FCC Political Ad Spending

Every TV and radio station must file political ad orders in the FCC's Public Inspection File. This is more granular than FEC data — you can see which station, which time slot, which dollar amount. The catch: filings are PDFs, often scanned.

This project builds an OCR pipeline to extract structured data from FCC Form 398 filings, producing a clean dataset for one swing state's TV ad market for one election cycle, with analysis of the top 20 buyers.

Data source: FCC Public Inspection Files (free, no auth). OCR via Tesseract or Claude Vision.