Yes. Very much so.
It is as much a human survival technique as feeding, copulating, or language. Seeing others fail provide us with warnings on what not to do, how not to behave, who not to anger, etc. The failure of another is a lesson to be learned - and thus must be watched. So we are wired to watch it by attributing to it an entertaining quality.
The key here is "self-destruction."
We don't feel so sorry for people we feel "brought it on themselves," because, well, they did it to themselves. Their destruction is the end of their own choices.
We *do* feel sorry for victims of tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes because it is not viewed as their fault...unless the area is prone to such things.
I guarantee the outpouring of support if New Orleans floods a second time will be much less because people will say "they knew it could happen, why did they go back there?" At that point, we attribute self-destructive tendencies to the individuals. Caring wanes and "perverse" observation begins.
The whole of human literature is based on the premise. In fact, the classical definition of "tragedy" is the fall from grace of a noble or powerful figure while the classical definition of "comedy" is the fall of the common man.
Go back to the ancient Greeks and look at Oedipus Rex, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other classic tales and you will see that even then the self-destructive tendencies of the individual was being exploited for entertainment and lesson telling purposes. Characters that entertain have fatal flaws in their own persons. Hamlet in Elizabethan England, Dante's Inferno, the Everyman plays and most other religious morality tales, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Italian commedia del'arte plays, Oliver Stone's Wall Street, Japan's The Crane Wife...all are about others bringing on their own fates. All are classics of entertainment.
People "excuse" such behavior when reading because those characters are "not real," but all the author is doing is exploiting our natural tendencies to witness such spectacles. they use fake people, fake settings, fake plots, but all of that only works because of the reader's very real desire to see another fail.
This attitude is not a result of our modern society.
It is universal, it is ancient, it is human nature. It is in every culture, every time, and every great piece of lasting art.
And what's more, it serves a purpose in human growth, development, and advancement. It is not perverse; it is actually beneficial.