From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. This week,

we're devoting our entire show to politics. Seriously, because earlier this year, a Supreme Court

decision reversed campaign finance rules in place for decades, opening the tap on undisclosed campaign contributions, which in turn flood

the zone with advertising like never before. Much more on that coming up. This campaign season

spending on political broadcast ads has exceeded a billion dollars, 250 million of which was spent

in the last two weeks alone.

Is it really worth it?

This hour will consider how that money talks and how far we've come, or haven't, in a half-century of television campaign ads.

The bedrock belief in modern politics is that money corrupts.

The axiom plays out from sea to shining sea or from Michael Bloomberg to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We seem to like the idea, the elegant simplicity of the notion that money buys elections.

I will tell you this, Brooke, if you go on the air as you're doing here and tell

people that campaign spending matters much, much, much, much less in electoral outcomes than they

think, people will hate you for it. Stephen Dubner is a journalist, co-author of Freakonomics,

and host of the popular Freakonomics podcast.

You have written about some research that your partner in crime, Stephen Levitt, did back in 1994.

Can you tell me about his methodology?

This was back when he was in graduate school.

And as an economist in training, he was doing a little bit of futs around in the political

science realm. And because he was doing a little bit of futs around in the political science realm.

And because he was manually typing in from the congressional record,

the names of candidates who ran against each other in years and years and years of congressional races,

...