You are wrong
All can and will claim 1st amendment protection. They can say what ever they want whenever they want and they will.
What you have suggested is water off a duck’s back.
Kumbaya is counterproductive
Ah, but the First Amendment does not intend to, and does not, create a “Fourth Estate” which is comparable to nobility or priesthood.Scalia explained the First Amendment’s language thus:
“the freedom . . . of the press” does not mean the same as “freedom of the press” would have meant. The latter formulation would have been absolute, and would not have admitted of suits for libel. The former formulation refers to freedom of the press as it existed when the First Amendment was formulated. Freedom, that is, to print truth and opinion but not to commit libel.As we all know, “the media” has been systematically telling half-truths - and more and more recently, outright lies - with abandon. Their main confidence that they cannot be punished is not the First Amendment alone but the fact that they are all in cahoots and have each others’ backs. And IMHO it would be hard to make the case that that has nothing to do with the fact that they are explicitly associated via the AP.The AP has already been found in violation of Sherman once, in 1945. Ironically, that was a lawsuit by another wire service, and it never assayed to attack the wire service model but, I argue, that is precisely what needs to happen now. The mission of the AP - of the wire service generally - is to disseminate the news while conserving scarce, expensive telegraphy bandwidth.
That mission made the wire services “too big to fail” when bandwidth was expensive. That is no longer true, and the wire services - and especially the gorilla in the room, the AP should be sued into oblivion.