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The central problem, IMHO, is the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision, in which SCOTUS unanimously held, with enthusiastic concurrences, that public officials (including judges) have no practical recourse to the courts when they are libeled. I’m not a lawyer, but having looked at it I hold that that is a bad precedent.
You have to understand the facts of the case. First, the plaintiff Mr. Sullivan was not a Republican, and was not a Democrat in good standing with the national party - he was a southern Democrat. So the Warren Court which then sat had plenty of ideological sympathy for the defendant New York Times but zero ideological affinity for the plaintiff. Not that that affected their thinking, of course . . . </sarcasm>
Second but more importantly, nothing about the case - which was about an advertisement which the NYT published and Mr. Sullivan resented - brought before the Court the salient points about “the MSM” - the fact that major journalism is monopoly journalism, the fact that monopoly journalism uses its propaganda power to aggrandize itself and the political implications of its commercial incentives, and the fact that the Democrat Party as presently constituted has no other raison d'être. than to go along and get along with the journalism monopoly.
In consequence, Democrats are essentially immune from being libeled, and Republicans are libeled routinely. Democrats don’t need access to the courts for relief, but Republicans do.
It is not to be thought that the First Amendment instituted freedom of the press. Freedom of the press existed before, during, and after the passage of the First Amendment. In fact, a seeming peculiarity of the phraseology of 1A actually makes that point. 1A refers not to “freedom of the press” but “the freedom of the press - and that is a big difference. “Freedom of the press” would have been absolute freedom, abolishing the laws of libel and pornography. A version of 1A which proposed absolute freedom - license - would, arguably, not have been ratified.
It is bad enough that the commercial incentives of journalism are to loudly promote their own virtue - “objectivity,” they call it - while knowingly being systematically negative (“if it bleeds, it leads”) about society as ordered by the constitutional framework. But abolition of any realistic threat of a libel judgement against printers who print/broadcast lies about constitutionally ordered society subverts the intent of the Constitution.