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I’ve read there are 6 major corporations as ‘owners’ of media conglomerates. It might be hard to break them up the way you could a true monopoly.

The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, constitute virtual meetings of all major journalism and journalists. Adam Smith’s prediction about meetings of “people of the same trade” certainly were prescient in that case. The concentration of propaganda power inherent in that was questioned as far back as the mid-1870s.
Note well, the wire services’ raison d'être is to reduce the cost of transmitting the news nationwide and worldwide—but the cost of telegraphy bandwidth is now de minimus. The wire services, arguably, should be abolished. Either that, or all members of the AP should be forced to admit that they are not independent - and just become branded as “Monopoly Press Philadelphia,” “Monopoly Press Cleveland,” and so on.

Now, just being a ‘public’ personality means anyone can say anything about you & pretty much get away with it. It should be that you can sue anyone who deliberately writes incorrect & malicious stories.

That’s what the effect of New York Times v. Sullivan has been. It is over broad in the sense that first the journalist monopoly makes you a “public figure,” and then it savages your reputation behind the Sullivan decision. But if in fact the Covington boys do sue, the fact that they are minors just might, in and of itself, make Sullivan inapplicable.
That issue aside, Sullivan distorts our discourse because it is evenhanded politically in the same way that laws against sleeping under bridges is evenhanded between rich and poor. Rich people don’t want to sleep under bridges, and Democrats don’t want to sue for libel. They don’t have to, because they don’t get libeled. In actual fact, Sullivan only constrains Republicans. That wasn’t nearly so obvious in 1964, when Sullivan was handed down, as it is today.
The rules for commercial success in journalism - e.g., “If it bleeds, it leads” - result in journalists being on the lookout for flaws in society which they can embellish or even make up. I well remember the emotional reaction I had as a youth upon seeing a printing press and envisioning myself writing things that would be published and held up as truth. I was far too humble to think that I would have that much, or anything at all, to say that was all that important. In my oh-so-humble opinion, journalists as a class are very short on humility. Journalists are cynical about society. Note well, when I use the word “cynical,” you are not to associate “cynicism” with “skepticism.” Those are two different things. “Skepticism” is doubt. “Cynicism” is actually the absence of doubt, it is negative certainty. Skepticism is the idea that your plan might not work. Cynicism is certainty that you could not possibly have a plan that will work.
Journalists are cynical about society - certain that it is corrupt and stupid - so they have no doubt that more government is needed to control it. Cynicism is actually a form of naiveté. Certainty that society is NG, consequently certainty that government is good. And that is what socialism is all about.
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . . Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)