I would, however, like to give props to Nate Silver, who had a good post a month ago about Hillary Clinton’s “poll-deflating feedback loop” set off by the erroneous Times story about a supposed criminal investigation. He noted that at the time Clinton’s press coverage was almost completely dominated by three kinds of negative stories: emails, declining poll numbers, and Biden speculation. And these stories were mutually reinforcing: weak poll numbers led to more Biden speculation, more negative stories hurt the poll numbers, and — Silver doesn’t say this, but it was obvious ー there was a blood-in-the-water effect on the press, which was encouraged to indulge its Clinton derangement syndrome by signs of weakness.
