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...entity is that each member of the Associated Press needs to stay in good graces with the whole of the Associated Press.

Ah!
You've simplified it!

We merely have to buy the AP!

Will Rodgers once said that he had come up with the solution to the submarine menace - “boil the oceans.”
Unless you’ve got Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in your pocket, “we” don’t begin to have the money - and the owners wouldn’t sell for any price, even then. They’re true believers!! It’s illogical, I know - but there it is.
There is IMHO only one conceivable remedy - sue their socks off, and they would not have the authority to refuse to sell. But the thing is, I don’t want to rule the AP, I want to ruin it! Its very existence is an anachronism (in that its justification is to economize on the transmission of news over long distances, and - compared to the founding era of the AP in the middle of the Nineteenth Century - bandwidth is free), and by its very existence it has the pernicious effects of causing an unconscionable concentration of propaganda power.
Understand, the AP has a history which includes being found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But it’s isn’t the AP specifically which is the problem; any wire service would have the same incentives and therefore in the long run would have the same effects. The idea of the wire service is the problem. Because the idea of the wire service is the idea of unlimited cooperation of all journalists - the idea of ideological - specifically socialist ideological - conformity. Journalism defaults to socialist ideology as the sparks fly upwards, for the simple reason that journalism defaults to cheap criticism - crying “Wolf!” - as a way of attracting attention and promoting itself. And that is what socialism is. Everything else about socialism is window dressing.