"[Hunter S.] Thompson... rightfully looms large for demolishing the idea that covering a campaign has to be objective day to day, or with the winner automatically cast as the hero..."

"... a la Theodore White’s 'The Making of the President' books. Along with unabashed drug taking, hoaxing other reporters, and honing a cultivated but nonetheless genuinely menacing edge, Thompson quickly grasped the fact and advantage of being shunned by press corp heavyweights. 'Thompson’s determined to turn liabilities into assets: 'I’m not gonna do what everyone else is doing. I’m gonna write about what I see, present the unvarnished truth as I understand it'.... That truth still resonates... and is perhaps best summed up in this from Thompson’s 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon in Rolling Stone: 'Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.'"

From "The gonzo journalist who forever changed political campaign coverage" by Jason Vest (WaPo). Vest discusses the new book "Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo" (by Peter Richardson).

The notion that "rotten" is an especially bad word called to mind a passage in the delightful old movie "Design for Living": 

"I'm going to jump up and down on your ego. I'm going to criticize you with a baseball bat. I'll tell you every day how bad your stuff is 'til you get something good, and if it's good, I'm going to tell you it's rotten 'til you get something better."

The 2 male artists she's talking to protest and defend their work only to hear her repeat the 1-word criticism "Rotten!" And much later, at the end, after various high jinks that take them apart and get them back together, they ask her "Can you still say 'rotten'?" and she says "Rotten!"

 ALL Credit of this post going to https://althouse.blogspot.com