I'll offer two examples, one old and one new(ish): the events surrounding the explosion aboard the USS Maine and the end of Gary Hart's presidential campaign in 1987.

First, the Maine. At the end of the 19th century, New York City newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were in a brutal battle for market share. They competed with lurid headlines and stories designed to attract readers and encourage them to pick up their newspaper instead of the opponent's. In 1896, Hearst hired a famous cartoonist away from Pulitzer, who fought back. The cartoonist was named Richard Outcault, and his cartoon strip was called Hogan's Alley. Its most famous character was the Yellow Kid, and the battle over the Yellow Kid gave rise to a term we use today ─ yellow journalism.

At the end of the 19th century, one of the big stories followed by Pulitzer and Hearst papers ─ indeed, many newspapers in the United States ─ was the war between Cuban revolutionaries seeking independence and the Spanish Empire trying to keep its hold on the island. This was a huge war, with hundreds of thousands of people involved. Just 90 miles from Key West, it was on the doorstep of the United States, and it offered plenty of avenues for coverage.

As dramatic as the fighting was, Hearst and Pulitzer reporters weren't above exaggeration. In one famous instance, Frederic Remington, one of the men covering the war for Hearst, produced a wildly lurid and inaccurate sketch of Spanish authorities strip-searching a young Cuban woman aboard an American passenger vessel. It was quickly debunked, but it's a good example of the type of thing that was happening. While Americans remained interested in the fighting in Cuba, they weren't particularly interested in becoming involved themselves, as demonstrated by the adventures of "Dynamite" Johnny O'Brien in running guns to the insurgents through Spanish and American blockades. (How his story hasn't been made into a movie, I'll never understand.)

There's a saying attributed to Hearst ─ "You supply the pictures and I'll supply the war." ─ that has been thoroughly debunked.

Nevertheless, war did come in 1898 when the American battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor. Rather than accept the Spanish investigation, which found that an internal detonation was to blame, Hearst and Pulitzer accepted no explanation other than a bomb or torpedo. The source of the detonation remains without consensus today, but publicity surrounding the incident encouraged many Americans to believe that the explosion was an act of war.

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Now, let's switch gears entirely to Gary Hart.

In 1987, Hart was a successful Democratic U.S. Senator who decided to run for his party's presidential nomination. That was a big deal ─ he was a popular figure and had a good chance to win. With Ronald Reagan term-limited, there was even a chance that he could fare well in the general election, too.

As it happened, however, Hart fell victim to changing mores in the United States. 1987 wasn't far from Watergate, and there were plenty of reporters who had gone through school or their early careers looking up to the example of Woodward and Bernstein, two men who brought down a president through scandal.

Hart had a reputation as a womanizer, and the Miami Herald received tips that backed up that assertion. It flew reporters to confront Hart in an alley, and it confirmed the story with photographs and accounts of Hart traveling frequently and acting suspiciously with women who weren't his wife. On May 3, 1987, the Hart story broke on the front page of the Herald.

The same day that the Herald broke its story, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of Hart. In an interview with E.J. Dionne Jr., the Times' political reporter, Hart had responded to Dionne's unwitting question about his alleged womanizing: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored."

The Herald folks didn't know Hart had said that a few weeks before. Dionne didn't know the Herald was breaking its story the same day. The combination was explosive.

On May 6, three days after the twin stories, Hart was confronted in New Hampshire by Paul Taylor of The Washington Post, who asked point-blank: "Have you ever committed adultery?"

Matt Bai has written a book about this event called All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. It sounds like what you're looking for.