How Journalists Are Using the Political TV Ad Archive To Go Deeper With Election Coverage

Last November, in a piece for MediaShift on the about-to-launch Political TV Ad Archive, a project of the Internet Archive using innovative technology to track political ads in the 2016 elections, I posed the following question: What percentage of total airtime for presidential political TV ads airing in Iowa and New Hampshire will be paid for by dark money groups? ... Answer: A lot closer to 2 than to 1. Fewer than one percent of the political ads focused on candidates aired in major TV markets in the weeks leading up to the Iowa and New Hampshire contests were sponsored by non-profit, or “dark money” groups.