Why death doesn’t halt the media attacks on Scott Adams

Among the many indignities suffered by prominent normies and conservatives is that news of their death will nearly always include an accounting of their ideological sins.

No one else gets this treatment, not even Third World despots.

Consider this week’s coverage of the death of “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams.

In announcing the cartoonist’s passing, leading newsrooms found it necessary to note that Adams was guilty of holding problematic views.

“Scott Adams, whose comic strip ‘Dilbert’ was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast, has died at 68,” went a New York Times news blurb.

The subhead to Adams’ official obituary reads, “His chronicles of a corporate cubicle dweller was widely distributed until racist comments on his podcast led newspapers to cut their ties with him.”

The Washington Post’s blurb concludes: “Adams drew criticism after he veered into far-right political terrain.”

Its obit subhead states, “Publishers cut ties with Mr. Adams after he made racist comments on a YouTube live stream.”

For context, the humorist’s “racist” remarks were spurred by a 2023 survey in which 26% of black respondents disagreed with the statement “it’s OK to be white,” while 21% said “not sure.”

“If nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people, that’s a hate group,” Adams said on his podcast. “And . . . the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.”

The editorial choice to lead coverage of Adams’ death with nods to those comments would be defensible were it consistent.

But it’s not.

Consider how these same newsrooms covered the death of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

The Times: “Hugo Chavez: A Polarizing Figure Who Led a Movement.”

WaPo: “Hugo Chavez, passionate but polarizing Venezuelan president, dead at 58.”

Passionate. Fiery.

Good thing Chavez wasn’t a racist, because then the people he starved, tortured and murdered would’ve been in real trouble.

When radio host Rush Limbaugh died in 2021, the Times’ obituary headline accused him of turning “talk radio into a right-wing attack machine.”

Yet when the godfather of modern terrorism died in 2004, the same paper gave us this doozy: “Yasir Arafat, Father and Leader of Palestinian Nationalism, Dies at 75.”

When Thomas Monson, the longtime president of the Mormon church, passed away in 2018, the Times’ headline noted that he “rebuffed demands to ordain women as priests and refused to alter church opposition to same-sex marriage.”

In contrast, the murderous tyrant who held Cuba for half a century got a Times tongue bath in “Fidel Castro, Cuban Revolutionary Who Defied US, Dies at 90.”

Its accompanying news blurb read, “Castro’s legacy has been a mixed record of social progress and poverty, of racial equality and political persecution.”

When the late Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe died in 2024, his WaPo obit accused him of being a “climate-change denier.”

But when the United States obliterated an infamous Islamic State chief, the paper gave us this timeless classic: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at the helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”

Then there’s the egregious difference in how two so-called “election deniers” are memorialized based on party affiliation.

In 2022, when Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana died in a car crash, her WaPo obit concluded with a blatant political attack: “A Donald Trump supporter, Walorski voted against impeaching the president in 2021 for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which resulted in the deaths of one police officer and four others and injured more than 100 law enforcement officers.”

One year earlier, the same paper marked the passing of Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings with a sentimental obituary describing him as “charismatic” and “pathbreaking.”

Yet in 2001, Hastings helped lead the unsuccessful effort to block the certification of George W. Bush as president, joining a Democratic walkout staged during the certification process and standing as the first to register his objections to alleged — but never proven —voter fraud. 

The Washington Post’s tribute to Hastings made no mention of his attempt to overthrow the results of an election.

The discrepancy is obvious, and it stems from the worldview so common in the left-leaning media — that politics is, and should, be all-consuming.

That’s why, even in death, conservatives are granted no peace: Death is no excuse for a cessation in hostilities.

When leftists say all-consuming, they mean all-consuming. 

Thus, the death of someone like Scott Adams is seen just as another opportunity to attack a political enemy for a supposed litany of -isms and phobias.

Meanwhile, those who’ve managed to fall into the loose hierarchy of left-wing “allies” are allowed to bask in their legacies, with even the worst of them romanticized as charming rebels and dreamy iconoclasts.

T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, DC.