The bar for scandal in the Trump administration keeps being raised.

Every week brings potentially damaging developments that in other contexts could have generated weekslong controversies. With so many competing stories, however, they are frequently ignored or forgotten.

As a result, even negative coverage can sometimes benefit President-elect Donald J. Trump by displacing potentially more damaging stories from the news agenda.

For instance, many of Mr. Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions have faced relatively little scrutiny of their backgrounds or records. Many failed even to complete background checks before the start of Senate hearings, a break from decades of precedent.

Or consider the case of Monica Crowley, an incoming National Security Agency aide found to have engaged in extensive plagiarism in her book (which Harper Collins pulled from the market), her Ph.D. dissertation and her Washington Times column.

These developments have struggled to gain traction amid the many competing stories about Mr. Trump and his presidential transition, including Tuesday night’s release of unverified allegations against the president-elect.

Scandals need time and space to develop. When the news cycle is congested, potential scandals are deprived of attention, causing the media to move on to other stories and the political opposition to anticipate that any criticisms will probably have little effect.

Many observers suspect that Mr. Trump seeks to exploit this dynamic by distracting the press and the public with stunts like meeting with Kanye West after delaying a news conference on conflicts of interest or tweeting about Meryl Streep before hearings to consider his nominees on Capitol Hill. It’s impossible to determine his motivations, of course, but the effect is often to divert attention from less flattering issues.

On Wednesday, for instance, Mr. Trump’s long-delayed news conference on conflict of interest issues was scheduled on the same day as hearings for six nominees. (After Democrats accused Republicans of scheduling the hearings in part to exploit this dynamic and divert the news media’s attention, some were rescheduled.)

History shows that potential scandals can easily be crowded off the news agenda by other events. During the chaotic post-9/11 period, for instance, the focus on more important events kept Army Secretary Thomas White in office despite numerous questionable decisions. (The post-9/11 surge in news continued all the way through the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, helping to insulate George W. Bush from fallout over the collapse of the Enron corporation and other matters; Bush didn’t suffer a major scandal until Valerie Plame was outed as a C.I.A. officer that summer.)

Another example came during the summer of 2009, when the death of Michael Jackson helped push the furor over the affair of the South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford, out of the news.

By contrast, relatively slow news periods may increase the likelihood of a scandal’s developing, as with the travel habits of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu in 1991, which became an issue in the months after the end of the first Persian Gulf war, and as with Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal in 2014.

In an article published in The British Journal of Political Science, I provide quantitative evidence suggesting that competition from other news stories can prevent potential scandals from reaching critical mass. Using data from more than three decades of news media coverage of the president and the executive branch, I show that when the incidence of major disasters and tragedies causes an unexpected surge in news coverage, the likelihood of a new scandal developing and the intensity of scandal coverage both decrease significantly. (I find that a similar dynamic appears to apply to governors.)

In this sense, the continuing reality show that Mr. Trump creates may help protect him from deep damage by any particular scandal. As in the campaign, he makes so much news every day that few stories ever generate sustained controversy. Instead, public attention lurches from one story to the next, never quite focusing on any particular controversy. He may prefer it that way.