"I do think a corner has been turned in the way he’s being covered,” Nate Silver, editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com, the data-driven news organization, told me in a phone interview Monday.

“There’s just a degree of directness in the way things are being stated that feels new.”....

The other possibility is that public support for the House’s impeachment inquiry may have stiffened the press’s spine. A slim majority of Americans, according to recent research from Gallup, support not only impeachment but also removing Trump from office.

Silver suggests a different dynamic.

“The myth of Trump as a brilliant tactician has been punctured,” he said — initially by the results of the midterm elections and then by the increasingly-hard-to-defend decisions and events that have followed, which have caused even stalwart Republican loyalists to criticize him, even if only anonymously and behind the scenes.

Warren has two obvious problems with party elites. First, there is the perception among some of them that her left-wing stands, such as Medicare for All, are too risky for the general election and decrease the party’s chances of defeating President Trump. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not outright endorsed Biden or specifically declared that she does not support Warren, but Pelosi has argued that the party needs to have a big, sweeping electoral victory in 2020, and that such a win requires more moderate policies, like focusing on improving Obamacare instead of pursuing Medicare for All. Those are sentiments decidedly on the side of Biden and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg and against Warren and Sanders.

Secondly, electoral considerations aside, there is a center-left wing of the Democratic Party that fundamentally disagrees with Warren’s more leftward positions. It’s hard to imagine some of these figures endorsing Warren before she has effectively already won the nomination. (That fits with Shor’s findings — Warren’s endorsers at the state legislative level are more liberal than the endorsers of any of the other candidates.)

These problems are not unique to Warren. Sanders was perceived as too far to the left by many Democratic elites in 2016; he got very few endorsements back then and is not getting many this cycle, either. (Sen. Amy Klobuchar actually leads Sanders in endorsement points.)

Warren also has a third challenge with party elites that is less obvious. The Massachusetts senator clashed with senior aides to President Obama for much of his tenure in the White House. She, like Sanders, isn’t quite in line with the party’s establishment. A Warren administration would probably be less likely to hire former Clinton (Bill and Hillary) and Obama aides in key posts than, say, a Biden, Booker or Harris one. So people connected with the party establishment (like many DNC members) may be fine with Warren but prefer other candidates for more self-interested reasons.

At which point, CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin added his self-critical perspective. “This is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on that," said Toobin. "And that’s something that I have felt a great deal of personal responsibility for because I talked about the emails here at CNN, I wrote about it in the New Yorker and I think I paid too much attention to them and I regret that, and I hope a lesson is learned. I mean, this story turns out to be ... a big nothing. And we spent months on it. Hillary Clinton very likely lost the election because of it, and I think I should have been talking about other issues, not about the emails.”

In January 2018, Toobin made similar remarks in a podcast with comedian Larry Wilmore. “I think there was a lot of false equivalence in the 2016 campaign," said Toobin back then. "That every time we said something, pointed out something about Donald Trump — whether it was his business interests, or grab ’em by the p---y, we felt like, ‘Oh, we gotta, like, talk about — we gotta say something bad about Hillary.’ And I think it led to a sense of false equivalence that was misleading, and I regret my role in doing that.”

For both of his meae culpae, Toobin has received applause from media-watchers. After all, not all pundits, editors and correspondents offer honest reflection of this sort.

A multiyear State Department probe of emails that were sent to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s private computer server concluded there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information by department employees, according to a report submitted to Congress this month.

The report appears to represent a final and anticlimactic chapter in a controversy that overshadowed the 2016 presidential campaign and exposed Clinton to fierce criticism that she later cited as a major factor in her loss to President Trump.