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I, too, have a vision for the renewal of the Republic. Seemingly, one less Sisyphusian than other approaches. Or perhaps, a realistic way of making the other needful things less impossible.
We must tame “the media.” Lots of luck, right? But what if a civil suit could bring it to book? That wouldn’t even require a single Republican politician. What would such a suit allege?

The Associated Press, and its member news outlets, together represent a monopoly. Although the various news outlets package the product differently and in that sense are competitors, “the news” is a product of wire services (particularly but not exclusively the AP), and that product is the result of a conversation among the “competitors,” which inevitably - as Adam Smith told us in Wealth of Nations - has resulted in “a conspiracy against the public, or some contrivance to raise prices.”

The conceit that journalism is objective is no part of the First Amendment and is not necessary for its rationale. Neither the First Amendment nor the rest of the Constitution implies a corresponding duty on anyone to tell the truth or to be objective. The constitutional regime places the onus on the reader to transcend Adam Smith’s warning (in Theory of Moral Sentiments:
"The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing."
For that reason, a monopoly on journalism, or on a reputation for objectivity, is anathema to the First Amendment.

Monopoly journalism naturally conspires against the public by exaggerating the virtue of journalism and journalists, and denigrating the competing claims to importance by entrepreneurs and others who work to a bottom line:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.
Journalists behave as critics, indeed as cynics; they despise the Theodore Roosevelt dictum above and far prefer the opposite, cynical formulation that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
This tendency extends to systematic promotion of Democrats as “liberal,” “centrist,” or “moderate” and the denigration of Republicans as “right wing” or “extreme.” It extends to the systematic denigration of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, converting the name into a byword for “smearing" Democrats by telling the truth about them. Systematically, the journalism monopoly promotes fraudulent narratives which not only have been revealed to be false with the passage of time but were never supported by serious evidence in the first place. The Duke Lacrosse case, the Zimmerman case, the massive campaign against Sarah Palin, the list is endless and extends back through the valid claims of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Communist influence in the government and through the Alger Hiss case.

The federal government, and certainly the FCC and the FEC, have no authority to place the imprimatur of the government on political speech/press, nor to regulate political speech or press at all.

It may be reasonably claimed that money is not “speech” - but there is no case that money is not essential to the workings of a press for ink, paper, reporters’ salaries, newspaper distribution, and for new printing presses. It follows that “Money is the Press” - and any regulation of political money is abridgment of the freedom of the press. “The press” in constitutional terms is not a right only of the AP and its member newspapers, but it is a right of any citizen who even might want to operate a newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV station. Any other interpretation is elitist and proposes that journalists are either priests or noblemen.

The justification and reason for the existence of the wire service was the economic distribution of news over very expensive telegraph bandwidth. The cost of worldwide data transmission bandwidth is now negligible in comparison, and the wire services are therefore in on sense “too big to fail.”

As to the question of the constitutional status of modern publicity technologies the Constitution explicitly contemplates the promotion of “science and useful arts.” So although there is no case that the framers specifically accounted for the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, or the computer and the worldwide web, if those technologies require regulation not contemplated in the First Amendment it is incumbent on the Congress and/or the States to amend the Constitution to authorize such regulation.

the Constitution would not have been ratified, in the opinion of James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, had they not had the right to publish the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym “Publius.” And according to the Ninth Amendment,
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. There is therefore no case for the claim (central to “Campaign Finance Reform”) that no one who indulges in freedom of the press may do so anonymously.

For all these reasons the courts should delegitimate the wire services, granting crippling damage judgements against the AP and the other wire services, and their memberships.