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I say it's the opposite. The more you talk about something, the more power it has.
Remember eating the cats? All those articles "debunking" the cat eating just drew attention to the fact that 20,000 Haitians were suddenly airdropped on a small town in Ohio.
Trump himself is a creation of the media. Perhaps the media thought they were able to trick the Republicans into nominating him. This backfired badly.
The way you win the news cycle is by talking about the things YOU want to talk about, not the strange and unexplained disappearance of your own political candidate.
This is the strategy I'm proposing, I think.
You find your candidate story, throw one or two news articles out about it, deliberately structured in a way to be suspicious, then say nothing more about it (it's not a story, so why would you?), and let the conspiracy-hungry side of the Republicans pick it up and waste a bunch of time talking about it. You don't just keep throwing articles at it the way they did with the Haitians, you largely ignore it. If anyone asks why you're not talking with it in a situation where it makes sense to say something, the line is "nothing happened so there's nothing to talk about". In the meantime, you just talk about whatever you were otherwise going to talk about.
Then later on you just toss out some rock-solid proof: you don't spend a bunch of time talking about it there either, but you make sure there's ironclad information making it very clear that nothing's going on (not in a "there are stories debunking this" sense, in a "anyone looking at this evidence for more than a minute realizes there's nothing going on" sense) and it's easily accessible.
The examples you propose are mostly the media trying to force an issue by throwing out a large amount of news volume, and indeed a lot of it backfired, both in that it got people thinking about it more than they otherwise would have and in that it caused the media to waste airtime they might have been able to use somewhere else. I'm proposing sort of the opposite: spend little time on it in terms of news volume, but bait a hook for Republican conspiracy theorists to bite so that they waste their time and credibility on a story that was poisoned from the start.
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