I don't think, but I feel like situation was slightly better for some reasons:

* there were no internet, so local communities strived to inform things happening around more objectively. Later on, there were no need for local newspapers

* capitalism was on the rise and on its infancy, but families with a single person working could afford some of the things (e.g. house, car) hence there were no urgent need to selling out all your principles

* people relied on books to consume information, since books were difficult to publish and not easy to revert (like removing a blog post), people gave an attention to what they're producing in the form of books, hence consumers of those books were also slightly demanding in what to expect from other sources

* less power of lobby groups

* not too many super-rich / billionaires, who can just buy anything they want anytime, or ruin the careers of people going against them, hence people probably acted more freely.

But again, can't tell exactly what happened at that time, but in my time press is not free. That's why I said "probably"

> * not too many super-rich / billionaires, who can just buy anything they want anytime, or ruin the careers of people going against them, hence people probably acted more freely.

The provided timespan encompasses the 'gilded age' era, which saw some ridiculous wealth accumulation. Like J.P. Morgan personally bailed out as the US Treasury at one point.

Much of antitrust law was implemented to prevent those sorts of robber baron business practices (explicitly targeting Rockefeller's Standard Oil), fairly successfully too. Until we more or less stopped enforcing them and now we're largely back where we started.

I think the 1876 election in the USA is an interesting case that counters this view.

I would disagree about capitalism being on the rise. Marx and his views grew after the 1850s and communist / socialist revolutions spread throughout Europe. There may have been more discussion of "capitalism" and an increase in industrialization, but "capital" had existed and operated for centuries before that. What changed was who owned the capital and how it was managed, specifically there has been a vast increase in central / government control.

I think this centralization of authority over capital is what has allowed for the power of lobbying, etc. A billionaire could previously only control his farms, tenant farmers, etc. Now their reach is international, and they can influence the taxing / spending the occurs across the entire economy.

Similarly, local communities were probably equally (likely far more) mislead by propaganda / lies. However, that influence tended to be more local and aligned with their own interests. The town paper may be full of lies, but the company that owned the town and the workers that lived there both wanted the town to succeed.