Yes, there were influential dissenters, like Lippmann and Murrow. But part of the journalism "myth" has been to build up their influence, much like the KGB over-stated its influence in the Cold War.
Again, you are way too hung up on AP, and not on all the myriad of other factors shaping journalism. I don't think there is a major scholar of journalism, including conservatives like Kuypers and Olasky, who would agree with your take on AP's influence. Somehow you got this AP bug under your bonnet, but the picture is much, much larger, and AP's influence much smaller than you suggest.
I have to strongly disagree that the press was "socialist" in its post-WW II composition, at least until 1960 or 63---the date remains to be determined. Our research is showing a strongly conservative, patriotic, and capitalist press in 1958-59. Yes, there are some disturbing tendencies---the Hitchens report of 1946, that said the press overdid it in its patriotic coverage of WW II. But for the most part the press was still in the same camp in the Korean War.
I have to challenge that analysis, Larry. My POV is that we have Newspeak characteristics in our political discourse which are IMHO inexplicable if you do not understand that our journalism has been complicit in implementing them. And that I can readily trace at least one of these back at least as far as the FDR administration, and apparently earlier than that.FDR applied the term "liberal" to himself quite unselfconsciously, and yet we know that during WWII F A Hayek, writing The Road to Serfdom to a British audience, unselfconsciously used the same word to mean "pretty much the opposite" of FDR's meaning (as Hayek himself ruefully noted in a later American edition). Indeed, my daughter made the point to me as recently as ten years ago that in her experience abroad the term "liberal" applies to exactly my own perspective, and noted the irony in my own use of that very term as a pejorative. I take that to mean that American political discourse had inverted the meaning of the word well before WWII. And I question whether there can be any other explanation than that journalism was in on it. Which implies that journalism was monolithic enough, that long ago, to have accomplished it without a controversy which would have left fingerprints.
In addition, Larry, I accept the M. Stanton Evans perspective on the Army-McCarthy hearings and the production of the term "McCarthyism" as a smear on McCarthy himself as well as on anyone to whom journalists and other leftists apply the term. That is a prototype for the current neologism, "swiftboating" - meaning (in plain English) "to tell the unvarnished truth about a Democrat," but meaning (in Newspeak) "to smear a Democrat." So we see that "swiftboating" and "McCarthyism" are near synonyms. I simply don't see how the case is made that the process which has produced "swiftboating" as a verb is any different, or requires any more cooperation from Big Journalism, than the process which produced "McCarthyism" as a noun. Nor, if such be the case, how it can actually be that 1950s Big Journalism, free as it was from the check of the New Media (and backed up by the Fairness Doctrine - now there's a Newspeak label for you) was less unified or less tendentious than the 21st Century version is. The closest thing to the New Media back then was The Reader's Digest (which published, indeed featured, The Road to Serfdom in a condensed version in its April 1945 edition).
My view of what was going on in the "McCarthy Era" is nicely encapsulated on p. 93 of Coulter's Treason:
In 1954, critic Leslie Fiedler captured the essence of "McCarthyism": "From one end of the country to another rings the cry, 'I am cowed! I am afraid to speak out!', and the even louder response, "Look, he is cowed! He is afraid to speak out.''IOW, a great hue and cry where, if anyone actually believed what was being said, he would expect to hear only the silence of the intimidated. The opposite case, but the same principle, as "the dog that didn't bark."I would want to scrutinize the methodology of any research tending to show the existence of non-leftist journalism at any time after the AP became entrenched. Explicit editorial page writing excepted, of course.
4 Advances that Set News Back is very interesting, and written by Steve Boriss, who teaches at Washington U. in St. Louis.