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The AP lady doth protest too much. They are an anachronism and their propaganda monopoly must be eliminated.

The AP is a monopoly; no American journalism outlet is “major” which does not belong to it. And in a larger sense, to the extent that other wire services do compete with the AP, they have the same institutional incentives as the AP has.

Journalism as such tends towards criticism and certainly never tries to actually do the deeds that it critiques others’ attempts at.

Journalism as such is about what happened today/yesterday, as if every day had equally significant events coming to light.
Those two characteristics which are intrinsic to journalism slant it towards cynicism and against conservatism and long-range thinking. The effect of the AP and any other wire services is to homogenize journalism by creating a 24/7/365 virtual meeting among all of major journalism.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The AP was found to be a monopoly by SCOTUS in 1945, but back then its mission - the economical use of transmission bandwidth in the dissemination of news nationwide and worldwide made it too big to fail. Almost 3/4 of a century later satellite, microwave, and fiber optic communication technology have obliterated the problem of transmission bandwidth cost. Now the AP is not too big to fail - it is too big, period.
The AP must be sued into oblivion, on grounds of what it does not report. “Half the truth is often a great lie” (Franklin) - and the systematic avoidance of reporting of facts which do not undercut conservatives (and promote instability such as Ferguson) is the consistent theme of journalism as we know it.
Competitive journalism could not possibly allow promotion of the “Saint Skittles” fraud, or of most of the other frauds upon which the Democratic Party consistently relies. The great problem is to get this issue into a forum where logic rather than demagoguery can prevail. And to craft a remedy not worse than the disease. The AP should, IMHO, be broken up - but according to what criteria, I am open to serious suggestions. Essentially, the problem is the overemphasis on the immediate which has been cultivated in the electorate by wire service journalism. This has enabled wire service journalism to cultivate a cult of omniscience, styled “objectivity.” Most of the time, however, it is not what WS journalism reports but what it does not - it is de facto censorship which all members of the AP are complicit in - which we at FR know because we pay attention to sources outside the AP borg, and to inconsistencies within that borg.
Ultimately it is not the AP alone, but the synergism with TV and the imprimatur of the FCC which really exploits the credulousness of the public. And the FCC depends for its credibility on the unmerited reputation of “seeBS” et al. Once dispose of the “objectivity” myth, and the rationale for the FCC and of the FEC both vanish.