The airwaves would soon be flooded with special interest messages. I'd rather see a media that objectively reports the views of the candidates and how they will deal with the issues vs. the media's obsession with digging for and reporting the dirt. The rules would surely resemble those applied for TV Debates, and as such would mitigate or eliminate fringe candidates or special interests. I very much agree with the thrust of your second point. We need more and better objective reporting of the candidates views and their positions on the issues.
Journalism is an imperfect science.
Some would say its an art form and that s often where the problems begin. The air waves that Airtime is transmitted over belongs to the American people. The Federal government grants a license to broadcasters to transmit programs in the public interest, and it grants the license at no charge to the broadcasters. To expect them therefore to grant a few minutes of Free time is really not asking very much. Further, a method of transmitting these candidate segments between programs is available by which not even the commercial broadcasts would lose any revenue from commercial messages.