I hope you don't mind the correction and apologies if you do, but it's actually "the lede was buried," where lede refers to structured writing in which the opening sentence of a paragraph summarises the most important parts of a narrative.
Here is another explanation that points to the telegraph being the origin, although they could only find one reference to it, while siting countless examples of it not being used outside of this very specific context.
felsokning|2 years ago
[1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu...
al_borland|2 years ago
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-...