Celebrity news hasn't been popping lately. It's vulgar—but more importantly, it's gotten repetitive. The new pastime is mocking the rich. But now, the journalists feel more sympathy with the fallen rich than ever before.

Watching the Wall Street titans lose everything in the Great Depression, for example, certainly inspired a lot of schadenfreude, egged on by the yellow journalists, which were the style of the day. But back then, journalism was a decidedly blue collar profession. The fall of the rich was a story told from the outside, to your peers, with just the natural amount of "take that, richie" thrown in.

Today things are different. People in the top-level media have become just as fancy as those they cover! Business reporters for the WSJ, TV reporters for CNBC, and, you know, wealthy magazine writers like Michael Lewis (for example) have far more in common with the ruined Wall Streeters than they do with the far-flung masses who were already poor to begin with.

Not only that, but the entire media industry in such an upheaval, and the traditional structure of the media that provided job security and luxurious perks to the journalism elites has been so destroyed, that it's almost impossible for those media people to feel anything but sympathy for someone in a similarly shaky industry like, say, finance.

Consequently, the rabble that makes up the vast majority of America has lost a certain amount of identification with the journalists that cover the ongoing financiapocalypse. Which is why it is more important than ever that we step up to fill the national schadenfreude deficit. It is the salve for a nation's angry soul.