Entertainment news used to be a Camelot of airbrushed perfection. Fan magazines gave us the inside scoop on Elizabeth Taylor's marital bliss, Michael Jackson's charitable work with children and Rock Hudson's lovely new girlfriend.

Nowadays, celebrity coverage is less fantasy than tragedy. It has become a series of bloody accidents on the information superhighway, and we're all rubberneckers.

In recent months the mass media -- from obscure Web sites and celebrity rags to CNN and The New York Times -- have offered saturation coverage of troubled young women. Britney Spears' apparent nervous breakdown, Lindsay Lohan's drug use and Paris Hilton's troubles with the law have been covered in pitiless detail.

Even lesser figures get the star treatment if their private problems are desperate enough. Reality TV has invited us into the troubled living rooms of Ozzy Osbourne and Paula Abdul, Anna Nicole Smith (who later died of a drug overdose) and Danny Bonaduce (who tried to take his own life during the show's first season).

Their lives have become our modern soap operas, roller-coaster sagas filled with ups -- She's finally entered rehab! -- but mostly downs -- She's relapsed!

But these are not scripted programs heading toward an inevitable happy ending. They're the struggles of real people in real pain who are flushing away their lives through reckless and boorish behavior.

And yet we follow it all with merciless delight, as if Britney, Lindsay, Paris and Anna Nicole were fictional characters. Prestigious outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post report it all. The worst of the new media -- such as the celebrity Web site Perezhilton.com, which reportedly draws more than 4 million visitors a day -- revel in each fateful misstep.

What's missing from this coverage are empathy and compassion, a sense of the terrible sadness of it all.

These star-crossed stars are responsible for their actions; on one level, they are getting what they deserve.

But our fascination with their self-destruction is disturbing. It reflects a mean-spirited and unforgiving nation, disconnected from decency, eager to revel in the misery of others.

Evidence of this hard-edged incivility is not confined to our treatment of celebrities. We see it in the angry talking heads who scream from radios and TVs, the filthy language that courses through our music and movies, the vicious voices that hold court in the blogosphere.

When did we become so nasty? How did our culture become so ungracious and rude?

Paradoxically, the roots of this sad situation can be traced back to happier developments that have also made us a kinder and fairer nation. In the 1950s and early '60s, by most accounts, America was a far more civil society. Men wore ties to baseball games, and etiquette encompassed a set of rules to live by.

Ugliness, however, percolated throughout polite society. Racism infected the nation, condemning blacks to second-class citizenship. Homosexuals were forced to live in the shadows.

Women had few choices. Their plight is evocatively portrayed in a new TV series on American Movie Classics, "Mad Men." Set in the go-go world of Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s, it brilliantly evokes the misogyny that pervaded American culture.

The articulate men in their handsomely tailored suits treat their female subordinates -- who are almost all secretaries, because that was as high as most women could rise -- as potential conquests. The men undress the women with their eyes and remind them with their words that the women are there to serve.

Watching this series today, it is almost hard to believe that such conduct was normal. The social movements of the 1960s and '70s largely ended that world. But the assault on a status quo that oppressed women, blacks and other marginalized groups also dismantled the traditional codes of propriety that defined polite society.

As equality and freedom spread, so did rude and coarse behavior. Americans became more civilized but less civil. We began treating one another far better, and far worse. While rejecting old behaviors that oppressed certain groups, we embraced a popular culture with a nasty, more personal edge.

We are left with a riddle: If the social movements of the 1960s and '70s led us to treat one another with respect and dignity, how could we succeed so spectacularly and fail so miserably?

It is tempting to see a direct link between these developments.

When the cultural cruelty that used to hold down women, blacks and other groups became unacceptable, we sought other forums for the release of our darker impulses.

Such a view regards cruelty as an inescapable human trait. The mean-spiritedness that prompts us to shout and curse at one another, to dehumanize troubled young women such as Britney, Paris and Lindsay, may be rooted somehow in our history.

But if the past six decades have taught us anything, it is that the most deeply ingrained habits and assumptions can be overcome.

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