Schadenfreude

It’s a German word that means to take pleasure in someone else’s problems.  Right now I’m experiencing it big time.  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation stock has fallen and attempts to gain full control of British Sky Broadcasting look very remote.

Many historians think one of the main causes of the Spanish-American War was newspaper competition.  When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, newspapers of the day whipped the nation into a frenzy, although there’s now general agreement that the ship’s powder room was too close to the boilers and the explosion was an accident.  A century later the media have changed, but the power to influence public opinion might even be greater.

Murdoch’s enterprises make or break British prime ministers and American politicians.  We have the News Corporation to thank for Glenn Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, and such commentators as Palin and Huckabee.  Fox “News” has coarsened the public discourse, almost never presents news in an impartial manner, and is still taken as gospel by the millions who think if it’s on television, it must be true.

I’m not exaggerating the problems of what passes for journalism today.  Here is a small example.  A majority of Americans think the debt ceiling should not be raised.