But since you insist, Watergate was the work of two metro reporters whose own editors (some of them) at times thought they were insane.  The rest of the national press, for the most part, ignored it, at least until after the 1972 election.  The Watergate break-in was five months before the  election, which Nixon won with about 60 percent of the vote.

Washington Post, page A01, October 2, 1971, three weeks before Election Day:

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and -- since 1971 -- represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

Law enforcement sources said that probably the best example of the sabotage was the fabrication by a White House aide -- of a celebrated letter to the editor alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) condoned a racial slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent as "Canucks."

The letter was published in the Manchester Union Leader Feb 24, less than two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. It in part triggered Muskie's politically damaging "crying speech" in front of the newspaper's office.

Roundly ignored by the majority of the national press.