From 1870 to 1920, when corruption appears to have declined significantly within the United States, the press became … of the informative press was one of the reasons why the corruption of the Gilded Age was sharply reduced during the …

was checkered with political scandal and widespread corruption that would not seem unusual compared with the most corrupt … developing nation today. We construct a "corruption and fraud index" using word counts from a large number of newspapers for 1815 … corruption from 1870 to 1920, particularly from the late-1870s to the mid-1880s and again in the 1910s. At its peak in the 1870s …