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Russiagate and its slow-mo collapse seems a good example of this incentive to fabricate scandals. Matt Taibbi has been writing about it for years, the details are too much inside baseball for me, but it's clear that the whole set of claims has been falling apart for years and that the TV channels and newspapers that were pushing it have never really admitted any fault.

Above the level to get your basic message out, campaign spending doesn't have much effect.

So I'm not surprised that learning about the candidates character had bigger impact.

probably not what you're thinking of but this came to mind per your comment; (pdf) https://www.uakron.edu/bliss/state-of-the-parties/papers/Kol...

Good point. Contemporary American political campaigning is just marketing. All about the eyeballs.