MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Hillary Papers and the Death of the Mainstream Media. I wouldn’t say “death.” They’re unreliable, incompetent, and gullible, but still very much alive.

That a conservative online newspaper could have understood the significance of the archive, and actually examined its public contents, seemed too much an embarrassment for the staffs of the major newspapers and networks and magazines to bear. By being the first to report on the papers, the Free Beacon exposed the inanity and irrelevance of the mainstream media. We beat them. And they are sore losers.

The very fact that the story appeared on the Free Beacon prompted journalists to append elaborate, silly, and inaccurate qualifiers to their reporting on our findings. In various outlets the WFB was called “relatively obscure,” “conservative,” “ultra-conservative,” and an “anti-Clinton website,” in order to make it easier for liberals to dismiss the story altogether. The case of CNN is demonstrative. The network wrote that a “conservative website”—guilty as charged—was “claiming” to have found documents shedding new light on Hillary Clinton’s years as first lady. “Claim” was an unusual choice of words, since the documents in the story were all on FreeBeacon.com. . . .

Even as some of the most prominent correspondents in America publicly stated that the story was beneath contempt and unworthy of notice, reporters and producers were booking flights to Fayetteville to see what else they could find inside the Diane Blair archive. Suddenly CNN, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, ABC, and others were devoting manpower and work hours and financial resources to cover a story they had neglected for years, all in the hopes that the supposed partisanship of the Free Beacon had led us to overlook some crucial element of the narrative, some nugget that would reveal Hillary Clinton as the saintly and courageous Tiger Mother of liberal dreams. And what have these crack reporters found that wasn’t covered in Goodman’s original report? “The former first lady coped with severe back pain from wearing heels,” says CNN. Stop. The. Presses.