TY - JOUR AU - Gentzkow, Matthew AU - Glaeser, Edward L AU - Goldin, Claudia TI - The Rise of the Fourth Estate: How Newspapers Became Informative and Why It Mattered JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 10791 PY - 2004 Y2 - September 2004 DO - 10.3386/w10791 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10791 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10791.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Matthew Gentzkow Department of Economics Stanford University 579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650/723-3721 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: gentzkow@stanford.edu Edward L. Glaeser Department of Economics 315A Littauer Center Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-0575 Fax: 617/495-7730 E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu Claudia Goldin Department of Economics 229 Littauer Harvard University Cambridge MA 02138 Tel: 617/613-1200 Fax: 617/613-1245 E-Mail: cgoldin@harvard.edu M1 - published as Matthew Gentzkow, Edward L. Glaeser, Claudia Goldin. "The Rise of the Fourth Estate. How Newspapers Became Informative and Why It Mattered," in Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, editors, "Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History" University of Chicago Press (2006) AB - A free and informative press is widely agreed to be crucial to the democratic process today. But throughout much of the nineteenth century U.S. newspapers were often public relations tools funded by politicians, and newspaper independence was a rarity. The newspaper industry underwent fundamental changes between 1870 and 1920 as the press became more informative and less partisan. Whereas 11 percent of urban dailies were "independent" in 1870, 62 percent were in 1920. The rise of the informative press was the result of increased scale and competitiveness in the newspaper industry caused by technological progress in the newsprint and newspaper industries. We examine the press coverage surrounding two major political scandals -- Credit Mobilier in the early 1870s and Teapot Dome in the 1920s. The analysis demonstrates a sharp reduction in bias and charged language in the half century after 1870. From 1870 to 1920, when corruption appears to have declined significantly within the United States, the press became more informative, less partisan, and expanded its circulation considerably. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that the rise of the informative press was one of the reasons why the corruption of the Gilded Age was sharply reduced during the subsequent Progressive Era. ER -