Thread by @fishnette

So a little rant-thread here about political TV contracts required to be posted by @FCC... i've been using these contracts to identify spending on #COpolitics TV ads, especially by dark money groups, since 2012. 1/

Those contracts helped identify dark-money groups like @mountainvalues & @UniteforCO early on, and reveal what they're spending on politics. 2/

In the last couple of years, the ability to find these contracts on the @FCC public files site is severely diminished. First, they got rid of the ability to look at a station's filings chronologically. 3/

The site's RSS feeds for cable stations never worked correctly. Then last fall, RSS feeds for ALL stations stopped working. This makes their system really tough to use. 4/

You've got to know which stations are in each market, then routinely check them for new filings in a series of Russian nesting doll folders. It was time-consuming before, but this is unmanageable. 5/

Recently, i tried to use the search function to find specific contracts. The "newest" filter on the page doesn't work. And filtering by year only works on the first page. 6/

I've reached out to @FCC media office (twice) and was told to fill out a form. I've also filled out the public files e-support form several times in the last couple of months. 7/

Also emailed a couple of folks who work for @FCC in this area. After a second email, was referred back to comms, which said: 'We are looking into this and will let you know if we have any additional questions.' 8/

The original intent here was to make these political ad contracts available to the public. But the inaccessibility of @FCC's publicfiles.fcc.gov site hinders that transparency. 9/

And it hinders my work as a journalist trying to provide information to the public. Would love to see @FCC fix these things, which cannot be all that difficult in terms of HTML, etc. Perhaps contract with @18F? 10/

Also, p.s. to #coleg: Federal law doesn't require stations to file contracts with details of spending and number of ads for state level issues, just candidates. But you could require it. /fin