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Emphasis mine. The salient point is that SCOTUS has held, at a given point of time in 1945, that the Associated Press was in violation of the Sherman AntiTrust Act. I am unaware of any subsequent SCOTUS holding to the contrary. That is, a lawyer representing the AP today would, in responding to a new charge of violating Sherman, presumably be on the defensive as representing an entity which was found guilty previously - and never held to have stopped being guilty - of violating the same law.

Note, however, that the charge under Sherman which the government lodged in 1944 (or earlier) alleged anticompetitive behavior towards journalists not members of the AP. Under Sherman, a different charge should and IMHO must be lodged against the AP - and its members, and against any and all competitive wire services and their subscribers/members.

Adam Smith asserted 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 in some contrivance to raise prices.” And the wire service - any and all wire services - constitute virtual meetings of the journalistic institutions which are members or subscribers to such.

I do not charge that that cartel contrives to raise prices, tho that might be happening somewhere. But IMHO “the media” is nothing other than the journalism cartel which inevitably results from all those meetings. The violation of the Sherman AntiTrust Act which is perpetrated by all wire services is a political “conspiracy against the public.

It is a given that any particular newspaper (etc) has the right to espouse its preferred politics on its editorial page. I even assert that any particular newspaper (etc) has the right to promote its preferred politics in what it suggests is objective reportage.
But the” conspiracy against the public" is in plain sight. It is the propaganda campaign to the effect that journalism - journalism within the good graces of the cartel - is crucially important and “objective.” In fact of course, objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being. Any serious attempt at objectivity must begin with the humility to accept that objectivity doesn’t come naturally to anyone, journalist or not. The effect of the assumption of the objectivity of everyone else in your profession can only result in groupthink. Anyone who does not go along with the journalistic consensus on any given topic does not get along with it. And promptly has his career “pecked to death” by unanimous proclamation that the miscreant is “not a journalist, not objective.” The ”conspiracy against the public” is the abolition of ideological diversity in journalism.
The entertainment imperative means that journalism is about difficult-to-ignore bad news and, consequently, journalism is negative. Negative about society, and implicitly naive about what society’s opposite - government - can do/be. The conceit that journalism is objective - when instead it is knowingly negative - is the very definition of cynicism. Which explains why “objective" journalism naturally produces pro-socialist propaganda. That is to say, propaganda against the very limited constitutional government under whose aegis America’s judges and justices all sit. A newspaper or magazine here or there promoting such would be one thing. A cartel monopolizing the word “objective” - to similar effect, it monopolizes the use of labels like “liberal” and “progressive” as well - is illegitimate.
The original raison d’être of the wire services was the conservation of expensive telegraphy bandwidth in the widespread dissemination of news to the newspapers. But in the Internet era, telegraphy bandwidth is dirt cheap, and the wire services are therefore no longer “too big to fail.” The wire services have no legitmate and significant raison d'être which any court is bound to respect. Whether by an individual or by the DoJ, the wire services can and must be sued into oblivion. Or else their members and subscribers have to be dismissed as a mere front group for the cartel.

Objectivity is probably better defined here as a sincere effort to be, rather than a state of mind. It requires genuine and dispassionate inquisition of and challenges to assertions.

One problem is that far too many journalists are too damn stupid to know what questions to ask.

A few weeks ago I heard Cuomo’s press conference where he stated flatly that the state had 14,000 ventilators in storage, and that he needed 40,000, and that only 900 were in use. Nobody asked him about this for 3 days - until the 3rd day a ‘journalist’ said “there are reports that the state has 14,000 ventilators in storage what can you say about that”.

3 DAYS! And it wasn’t ‘reports’ that stated it. He stated it himself. And it took longer to challenge him on why he claimed he would need 40,000 when only 900 were in use and 14,000 were in storage. To be fair, he did explain why - he said the models indicated they would need 40,000 which we now know turned out to be wrong. Not only that, something around 80% of people on ventilators die - an indication that ventilators are not helpful at all, and possibly even harmful. But few challenge this assumption. Instead they are digging for evidence that HQC doesn’t work. And to be fair, it probably doesn’t work when you give it to people already on ventilators. Too late.

Anything for a click should be the new motto for journalists. Sensational headlines. Saw a headline recently that read “Laura Ingraham Bashes Trump”, and not a single word in the story about the headline at all.

compassion, this is good info. I'm sure that one way or another the corrupt press will eventually find a rope to hang themselves on. They are trying mighty hard.

They have already paid a price for attacking Trump unjustly. CNN's numbers are down. And we learned two days ago that the stock value of Gannett (USA Today) is down 95% -- partly due to the virus impact on its advertising, but seeing the poor quality of the paper at my local library, I suspect the decline has occurred over a few years.

Nonetheless I take issue with Adam Smith's assertion that "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

Here are some points to consider:

The Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) lived long before the establishment of modern corporations, industries, and typewriters (1860) that helped reporters compose their stories.
In the modern world, colleagues in the same trade meet once or twice a year at conferences, seminars, and trade shows. Each year I attend a massive 6,000 person trade show, International Telecom Week (Atlanta), where people all over the world come to meet for a few easy at the price of $550 for admission, plus travel and hotel expenses. Tons of partnerships are formed -- and (God forbid) some beer and wine "merriment" occurs :-).
Competitors often engage in "coopetition". It's not so much a conspiracy but a practical understanding that it often makes economic sense to make peace in certain areas — but battle like hell for any uncontested territory and new opportunities.
Now as as an industry journalist, I occupy a tiny niche in the huge tech industry. Yet I fiercely try to protect my little rice bowl. Likewise, my colleagues in the business cover the same overall market, but specialize in sectors that have carved out for themselves.
So I'm not so sure there's a strong parallel to what the New York-to-Washington press does in covering national news for consumer and citizen consumption.
The trade press that covers industry gets its money from companies who serve very specific customers and professionals with a needs for common solutions. The national press is more geared to pleasing the Fortune 500, particularly those firms reaching out to consumers.
One good guy to read for a historical view of Journalism is H. L. Mencken, perhaps the finest and most prolific pundit and newspaper reporter America every produced. The interesting thing about Mencken at the same time he was the leading columnist in the country, he also was the country's foremost literary critic. This was a guy with Trumpian stamina!
One essay I lightly edited and posted on FR was Vox Populi, a devilishly-fun-to-read analysis of the American political scene back in 1922.

The Complete Perversion of the Law

But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

Bastiat