One of the best recent FCC decisions was the requirement that all broadcast television stations make available online the public inspection files that used to be accessible only if you were willing to travel to your local TV station and wade through filing cabinets full of paper documents.
Now you only need to go as far as your personal computer to search, an especially valuable tool for those who want to know who’s paying for all those political ads that jam the airwaves during election season and deliver a fortune to broadcasters. While not a perfect system, with the ever-increasing secrecy over the sources and amounts of campaign contributions, the FCC rules are one way to try to figure out who’s writing the checks.
