Have you seen Lawrence Lessig's plan [1]? It involves offering tax vouchers to citizens to spend on candidates who pledge to only raise funds via those vouchers. Plenty of money would be spent on candidates, it would just happen in a more flat, distributed fashion.

Also? The current system already gives an immense amount of power to media companies; a huge sum of campaign finance contributions wind up in their coffers, and they have tremendous incentives to maximize controversy and conflict, indirectly forcing candidates to spend more and more on advertising. And at the end of the day, they still have a strong voice in creating self-fulfilling prophecies over who is "electable".

[1] http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-13-2011/exclu...