FORT STOCKTON, Texas — The journalistic cliche is that someone comes running into a newsroom, shouting: “I’ve got a story that’ll bust this town wide open!” So stop the presses; re-do the front page. But in these days of the Internet, you don’t stop the presses. You merely write it ASAP and hit the “publish” button.

A top conservative news blog and much of the conservative media recently ran a revelation that they thought would bust wide open former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel’s bid to become Secretary of Defense: they reported that Hagel secretly got funds from “Friends of Hamas.” The tiny problem: the group doesn’t exist.