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It always comes down to the fact that none of this would be going on without the support of the Borg known as “the MSM.”

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. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
The Associated Press “wire” is a virtual meeting of all major US journalism, and it has been in continuous operation since before the Civil War (“The New York Associated Press” dates to 1848). The fatuous conceit that journalism’s interest is identical to the public interest is pathetically naive. Be assured that it did not take a century and a half for “associated” journalism to find reasons to practice on the credulity of the public.
Free journalism is protected from the government by the First Amendment. But the public has a right to be able to choose to access to printed fact and opinion from sources of unrestricted provenance - which are not only free (from the government), but also independent (of private monopolistic control). That is an example of the reason for the

Amendment 9:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

(which answers the objection to the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the body of the Constitution). The authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights did not anticipate that monopolistic private propaganda power would arise which would be able to effectively lie to the public by embargoing half the truth.
But although the First Amendment does not anticipate the problem, the Sherman AntiTrust Act answers the purpose. Evidence abounds that Borg journalism would rather “climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth” about the Democrat Party and the Republican Party. The Republican Party must sue “The Associated Press and its members, joint and several liability” - and the Federal Communications Commission - for triple damages as provided under Sherman. The AP should be abolished by punitive damages, and the members of the AP should be forced to act on the understanding that the laws of libel apply to their treatment of Republican politicians (and Democrats, too - not that they ever get libeled). That would entail a SCOTUS decision contrary to the 1964 NY Times v. Sullivan decision which makes it hard for pelicans to sue for libel on the basis that there is political balance in journalism.
Political balance - ideological competition - in journalism existed in the founding era, but was thin on the ground in 1964 and is essentially nonexistent now. That is in large part due to the AP. The wire service was invented to apply economies of scale to the cost of propagating news, at a time when telegraphy bandwidth was expensive. It is now dirt cheap, and in that sense wire services serve no legitimate purpose to justify the damage to ideological diversity in journalism.