Is it O.K. to publicly dump on the newly deceased — or for that matter, to offer them not-quite-heartfelt praise? It’s a tough call. No one likes a hypocrite. Just the same, there is surely a time and a place for everything.

The journalist and cultural critic H. L. Mencken had no doubts. When William Jennings Bryan died in 1925, he denounced the muddle-headed three-time presidential candidate and notorious opponent of evolution as “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.” He added: “He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

Today, plenty of naysayers are aping Mencken.

In an elephantine piece for Salon in 2011 on the “protocol for public figure deaths,” the journalist Glenn Greenwald scoffed at the effusive coverage years before of Tim Russert, the moderator of “Meet the Press,” and of Ronald Reagan. Dismissing the former as “awful” and “power-worshipping,” Mr. Greenwald complained, “We were all supposed to pretend we had lost some Great Journalist.” The latter’s post-mortem “canonization,” he charged, virtually ignored the Iran-contra scandal, exorbitant military spending, indifference to AIDS, vast income disparities, implicit racism and the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork — all in a sentence of about 160 words.

The proximate peg for this invective, incidentally, was the expiration of Christopher Hitchens. Rejecting the “remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions,” Mr. Greenwald exhaustively savaged Mr. Hitchens for his “repellent” advocacy of the war on terror.

Mr. Hitchens most likely would have loved it. In 1997, baffled by the worldwide grief over Princess Diana’s fatal car accident, he ripped into her as “a spoiled child bride, a sulky wife, a narcissist, a borderline airhead with zero interest in books, history or tradition.” After the Rev. Jerry Falwell departed, he said, “I think it a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.”