From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

In Iowa this week, Wal to Bleacher's coverage of caucusers caucusing and of an emergent

insurgent, GOP runner-up, Rick Santorum.

It was as if the media were supercharged with ethanol.

I can only say three letters.

OMG.

Look at this.

Look what's going on.

One vote.

One vote right now.

As it stands right now, too close to call, and it's just unbelievable when you look at the numbers. He's still too close to call, and we do not have any idea when we're going to be able to call this. It's great.

But we're not going to cover the Iowa caucuses because they totally didn't matter. What does matter this week

and always about the political process is where the money comes from to fund campaigns and

how that money is spent. State and federal election commissions collect fairly good data on the

contribution side, but the spending side is mainly mysterious.

That's largely because the recipients of the cash, chiefly local TV stations, have very

limited obligations for making the information public. Till now, they've merely had to keep a public

file of political ad sales and submit that file for review to any member of

the public who physically walks into a station to request it. A proposed Federal Communications

Commission regulation would require stations to routinely digitize the data so that the FCC could

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