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I don't know but I suspect if one were to take a long hard look at media financing(advertising) we might be a step closer to figuring out how they pulled it off. That is, was there a conspiracy, or collusion, between red journalism and advertisers??? How else could they have accomplished their all but complete takeover of the media? A more interesting question might be, why would advertisers have gone along with the plan. Was the red media able or more willing to cut the cost of advertising to cut the legs from under more "balanced" media?

IMHO advertising is to a certain extent a protection racket - you have to pay newspapers to say what you want them to say, just to balance out the things that they say anyway that you do not want said. It may not be true that "advertising is the only truth to be found in newspapers" - but it is pretty close, and it is even closer to say that advertising is the only good news to be found in newspapers.

MY question is, HOW did they achieve dominance in an otherwise wild west journalistic free-for-all?

As you know, my opinion is that journalism became homogenous, essentially part of a Borg, with the advent of newswires. Newswires are expensive, and they are not truth machines but only communication channels. It takes propaganda to convert the communication into belief. That propaganda is the claim of journalistic objectivity. Inasmuch as belief in your own objectivity is an excellent definition of subjectivity, it is impossible to even attempt to be objective at one and the same time that you are claiming to be objective. So "journalistic objectivity" is a self-negating claim - and yet massive repetition has led to its acceptance.
Winning acceptance of your claim of objectivity is dominance.