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There is one “network” which is the sine qua non of the others. It is the “objective” journalism network. The linchpin of that network, the thing which made it a network, is the Associated (telling word) Press.
Journalism was an entirely different animal before the advent of the telegraph and the AP in the mid-Nineteenth Century era. Before the AP, each newspaper was primarily about the opinions of its printer, much as the EIB is about the opinions of Rush Limbaugh. A cause, and an effect, of the lack of news sources which the public did not in principle have access to was that newspapers were mostly weeklies.
With the advent of the AP, newspaper reporters might work for, say, the LA Times - but they write for the AP as their hoped-for audience. The upshot is that the AP “wire” is a continuous virtual “meeting” of all the major journalism outlets. And Adam Smith told us what to expect from that:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices."
The AP, and all “objective” members thereof, constitute a conspiracy against the middle class. That conspiracy attacks the middle class for the simple reason that that is where the competition is: that is where things get done, and that is who tends to get the credit for getting things done. And it is precisely the desire for the credit for all the good things getting done which journalism lusts after. Journalism applies whatever labels it thinks are positive - e.g., “liberal,” “progressive,” “moderate,” “centrist” - to politicians who put PR above all else, and who therefore cooperate continuously with “objective” journalism.
“Objective” belongs squarely in scare quotes for the simple reason that while it is possible, and creditable, to attempt objectivity, anyone who claims to actually be objective is not objective about himself - or much of anything else, in reality.

You are more correct than you know. In a previous life, I was a journalism major and saw these people in their formative stage. To say that they were lazy and arrogant would be an understatement. There is a reason that they hate Sarah Palin with such an intensity and it has even more to do with her intimate knowledge of their profession than her core value conservatism.

But these people don't only go into journalism; they are a major source of new state department hires. The revolving door between journalism and government is legendary. What other two professions share such a common contempt for traditional American values while hypocritically posing as the neutral arbitrators for all that is just and fair?

People like George Stephanopolus are not the exception; they are the rule. We simply do not hear about most of them because they have much lower profile jobs in media and government.