In earlier times, there were several newspapers in even a smaller city, and all of them together gave an accurate view of the news. As a result, it didn’t matter if one newspaper was biased; the overall biases of all the newspapers would average out.
When television began, it was really expensive to operate a station, and so a region that had dozens of newspapers might have only one or two television stations. As a result, the government put in regulations on political speech that applied to television stations. They could do this despite the guarantee of freedom of the press because wavelengths for broadcasting were seen as a public good that the government had an interest in regulating, and the licenses to use it were given out in exchange for adherence to a specific code of conduct.
Now, newspapers are dying, and only a few cities have more than one local newspaper. And TV stations are proliferating, and easily reach national distribution. But the regulations on political speech are remnants of an earlier time when it was the other way around.