What you call "scrutiny" from the media and what I, a former journalist and editor, mean by the term are quite likely two different things entirely. Reporters have, by and large, become sensationalistic and lazy, skimming the surfaces of potential stories like someone lightly skipping pebbles across the surface of a pond. Only a few actually delve deeply into the entire subject being covered, and only a tiny few are unswayed by ad-buy dollars of their CORPORATE-greed-driven stations. News coverage these days is all about those dadburn...R A T I N G S...and rarely do we viewers or listeners encounter true SUBSTANCE.
Exceptions would be PBS's "News Hour," "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC (she's proving herself to be pretty good at investigative reporting and she tries to be both honest and fair), C-SPAN1 and C-SPAN2 (uninterrupted coverage of House and Senate sessions, respectively), and a few peripheral news reports scattered here and there over time. Most have become like the forest ranger who deliberately sets fires so he or she can be the one to appear "heroic" doing battle with the flames.
Ayers and Wright were never legitimate issues and were propaganda-driven to score hoped-for negative political "power" points or play "king of the Hill" mind-games with the voting public by the right-wing zealots horrified that a man of color was chosen to lead this nation to safety. The Palin e-mails had been requested in the hopes of stirring up a hornet's nest of "hidden" controversies, but proved to be LAME and almost BORING once everything was reviewed. Palin's TARGETS for Democrats should have been thoroughly investigated---reporters should have been asking WHY would an American woman, supposedly a public servant as governor, advocate GUN VIOLENCE against other American citizens who were also public servants and then POST this advocacy on a PUBLIC FORUM? If these questions had been asked at the time the offensive behavior occurred, perhaps Gabby Giffords and the other people shot would have been safe.