If you want to figure out what’s gone awry, don’t look to the malefactors of wealth or the right wingnuts, they’ve always been around doing their thing. What’s different is our allegedly free press being neither adversarial, openly partisan or responsible, any combination of which would at least create the conditions within which a democracy could function. As it is, hoaxsters, hucksters and millionaires seem to be the only ones able to manage.
The Germans should have invented a word that’s like “schadenfreude,” but describing the feeling that comes when someone expresses something in a such a way that you feel vaguely uncomfortable agreeing with them. Schaden-noddin’, maybe?
Whatever the word, it would roughly describe what I felt last night as Keith Olbermann made some convincing points in a Special Comment that furiously (and sanctimoniously) rebutted Ted Koppel’s passionate (and sanctimonious) bemoaning of opinion in TV news today.
