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The AP is, IMNSHO, the #1 reason the mainstream media are so biased. Every newsroom in which I've ever worked has subscribed to AP, and it's regarded as impartial, the best source of facts available short of a first-person interview. Truth be told, AP is just another CommieLib propaganda outlet, which has infected every mainstream newsroom in America, be it radio, TV or print. Furthermore, their writing is atrocious, on the local level especially!

It sounds silly to me now, but for decades after I caught on to the existence of the tendentiousness of journalism I wondered why journalism changed from the open political argumentation of the founding era to the pretentious "objectivity" (leaving aside only the editorial page tucked into the back of the first section) which we have always known. I happened to see

Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails:
The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War
by Tom Wheeler
in the library, and suddenly I knew: the thing that transformed journalism was the telegraph. And upon a trivial amount of investigation,

News Over the Wires:
The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim
that the AP was the mechanism by which the telegraph transformed the newspaper business.
The interesting thing is that, according to 4 Advances that Set News Back, the AP was found by SCOTUS to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945. It would seem that all manner of slander and tendentiousness (under color of law in the sense that there are, contrary the the First Amendment IMHO, laws like McCain-Feingold which are predicated on the objectivity of journalism) which could be causes of action in civil court. Perhaps even triple damages under RICO . . .
The AP is an anachronism in the sense that its reason for existence was the economical transmission of the news quickly over long distances - and bandwidth is now so cheap, and the Internet so pervasive, as to transcend the AP for that mission. Now it is simply the mechanism which homogenized, and continues to homogenize, reporting. At the 9/12 rally in Washington I carried a sign saying,
Think Outside "The Wire" - no AP
Someone should sue it into oblivion.