News stories illustrating the imbecility and unfairness of humanity are so commonplace as to be almost banal yet on a regular basis you come across stories that make you go ‘Bah! Horrid world! I want to get off this planet.’

This week two stories came around within about 24 hours of each other, which on their own might have been depressing enough, but coming together gave me a really big bah! moment.

The first was that a poll in the US suggested that the most trusted news source in the US was Fox (read). The second, the very next day, was that Wikileaks has gone offline for lack of funds (read).

Fox News is either a paradigm of right thinking, or if you don’t actually live under a rock, it is the paradigm of the thinking of the right — anthrax to the intellect, purveyors of fine propaganda on behalf of the radioactively plutocratic. It is also by any objective standard a behemoth of the media, owned by News International, the second biggest media conglomerate in the world, prop. one Rupert Murdoch.

The non-behemothian Wikileaks is, in its own words, “a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public,” and which publishes leaked documents from governments, corporations and religious organizations, documents the authors would prefer kept from public sight.

In other words, it is probably the bane of many of the people R. Murdoch has tiffin with.

But why am I explaining who Wikileaks are when you might already know, or when you could read a more coherent account here on Wikipedia?

The point is, while Fox, the fountain of untruth, goes from strength to strength, Wikileaks, exploder of porkie pies, is in danger of going offline for lack of money.

Just another tale of humdrum iniquity — well, what do you expect? Wikileaks should carry advertising and give up its independence from outside interests, let the free market control the flow of information.

Well, I’ve put my credit card where my blog post is and contributed to Wikileaks fundraising drive and I mention this story because there may be more people out there who would like to exclaim ‘Bah, horrid world!’ with me and then try to make a small difference.