Political ads mean big bucks for broadcasters. This year, campaigns and interest groups will pay local TV stations hand over fist for access to the public’s eyes and ears. Driven by the influx of Super PAC and other third-party spending, these stations are expected to rake in more than $3 billion this election cycle.

Broadcasters are required by law to make records about the political advertising time they sell available to the public through their stations’ political files. But up until now it’s been hard for members of the public to actually see this information since it’s been hidden away in filing cabinets at TV stations.

The FCC recently helped to pull this information out of those cabinets and into the 21st century. In April, the FCC adopted a rule requiring television broadcasters to post portions of their public file, which includes the political file, in an online database. This common-sense rule means that you can skip the drive to the station and look online to see which candidates and organizations are buying time on your public airwaves.

But common sense hasn’t stopped broadcasters from trying to gut the new rule. Last month, the National Association of Broadcasters filed a lawsuit to reverse the FCC’s action. Another coalition of large TV station owners has formally asked the FCC to reconsider its decision. Broadcasters have also enlisted powerful allies in Congress in an effort to cut FCC funding to implement the rule.

So what exactly is the broadcasters’ beef with the FCC rule? They argue that uploading this information to the Internet would be too costly and burdensome, and that posting information about what stations charge for political commercials reveals “sensitive” data about ad rates.

Look under the bun, though, and these claims don’t have a lot of meat to them. Broadcasters have been using computers in every aspect of their business for decades. In a world of screens and keyboards, this sudden passion for paper seems a little strange. Besides, the FCC will minimize costs to stations by setting up the centralized database where public and political file information will be available. And that supposedly sensitive ad-rate information? It’s already public, located in those same paper files you can access right now at your local station. If competitors want it, they can get it.

Surprisingly, in the fight to make broadcasters more accountable to their communities, advocates of media and political transparency have found an unlikely exemplar: Time Warner Cable.

As reporters for the Honolulu Civil Beat and the Sunlight Foundation pointed out last week, while broadcasters have been fretting and fussing (not to mention lobbying and litigating) over having to post their already-public records online, it turns out that Time Warner already does so — and has since 2010.

So is Time Warner throwing caution and good business sense to the wind by posting its political ad information and rates online? Nope. As a Time Warner spokesman told the Sunlight Foundation, the company places this information online because it’s cheaper and easier to do so and it “reduces paperwork headaches.” What’s more, Time Warner apparently has no qualms with posting its political ad rates for all to see.

Time Warner deserves props for taking its political file disclosure seriously and making that information easily accessible to the public. If nothing else, Time Warner’s online file initiative puts the lie to broadcasters’ most strenuous objections to the FCC rule and their claims that no one else puts this information out there. It shows that putting these records on the Internet is cheap, convenient and harmless.

Broadcasters are custodians of the public airwaves. You and your community deserve meaningful access to political ad information, which will allow you to hold your TV stations to account. If the nation’s second-largest cable company can post its rates online, surely broadcasters can too. What’s more, as the FCC and Congress have said, they must.

Timothy Gray is a Free Press C. Edwin Baker Media Policy Fellow. To learn more about this fellowship click here.

Original photo by Wikimedia Commons user P. Tudela.