It's just a lot harder to hide things nowadays.

It has probably been like this for centuries.

I dont know if this is just rose tinted glasses, but i feel like the west used to be a higher trust society

Go read about the rates of simony in early modern Europe.

Yeah, it's there in every industry, though it seems more prevalent in those that are heavily reliant on taxpayer money.

Taxpayers have the most money, and aren't as interested in protecting the money, unlike people that have ownership.

If your goal is to extract a percentage, find the biggest cashflow to maximize profits.

Maybe it seems relevant because those are the ones getting caught?

Or maybe the corporate owned news doesn't like to publish corporate corruption?

This only makes sense if the corruption is in the same corp that's doing the reporting.

Corporations have an incentive to undercut one another and compete. They'll only band together when something affects them all at the same time, which is basically only economy-wide events.

By that logic, the defense industry should have orders of magnitude more problems than the average research university.