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You went into crazy land when you said they conspire. Anybody, including you, can get the AP feed. Not much of a conspiracy.

I’m not saying that the “conspiracy” - the agreement among journalists that there is not, and will be, ideological conflict among journalists - is secret. It is an open secret that if you challenge the objectivity of a journalist in good standing, all other journalists in good standing will land on you like a ton of bricks. If you started out thinking you were a journalist, they will disabuse you of the notion - tons of ink will be dedicated to making sure everyone knows that you are “not a journalist, not objective.”
They like to accuse conservatives of code words and “dog whistles.” But “objective” is their code word for "wise.” Anyone with liberal education knows that it is arrogant to claim to be wise, and the Greek word for wisdom - “soph” - is the root of the word “sophistry,” meaning mendacious argumentation. So even journalists, as arrogant as they are, don’t claim wisdom for themselves.
Except that they aggressively use “objective” as a code word meaning pretty much the same thing. And they do it within the context of a mutual admiration society - you attack me as a member of the journalism community, the rest of the members of the journalism community take up the cudgels for me, I don’t have to defend myself. With the understanding that if anyone else in the community gets attacked, it will be my turn to counterattack to protect them.
You can say it’s not “a conspiracy” in the sense that it is an open secret - but if you cross it, as you theoretically have a perfect right to do, that “non-conspiracy” will do its best to make you wish you hadn’t exercised that right.

It’s just a source of news, and really not even for journalists, it’s for publishers to not have to pay journalists. They pull stuff off the wire instead.

Of course. Except that the AP sets standards - some perfectly unexceptionable, some with direct political implications. It was a scandal in journalism when, on the day Lincoln was shot, the first report of the shooting “buried the lede” - it rambled on about other things and only tangentially mentioned that Lincoln had been shot. So the AP instituted the rule about the “pyramid organization” of news reporting - important story element first, gradually filling in the less significant elements of the story later. Perfectly unexceptionable. But then there are things like the prohibition of the use of the term, “illegal alien” to describe an alien in the country in violation of US law. Things that require that a story not be too conservative in tone.