I think the reason that journos consider Scott Adams somehow worse than the likes of O.J. Simpson, and Dick Cheney is because the things Simpson and Cheney did don't really affect them.
They can't internalize what it means to have your daughter murdered by her partner (they have no kids). And they can't put themselves in the shoes of an Iraqi family, or a combat veteran.
But what Adams did, to say "move away from these people", was to display disgust, and being the object of disgust is something very real to the journo.
Every form of revulsion, distaste, or aversion is a trigger for the journalist. It gives him flashbacks to all the times someone said "come on kids, lets go", "I don't date journalists", or "no comment". What the rest of us see as probably sage advice - even if a tad rude - shakes the journalist to his core.
And so he HAS to represent it as unjust and irrational hatred, because to grant any form of disapproval the slightest bit of understanding is to admit that there is a chance, that the haters might actually be right.
But when they go so far as to represent disgust as being WORSE than murder and genocidal war crimes, that's when they accidentally tell on themselves.
> The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.
~ Hunter S. Thompson
