In his time, certainly, the people you couldn't criticize were the rulers, in our time there is a wider range of people you can't criticize.
And in a totally different response, the vitamin D comment reminded me of the ad council messages of the 80s and 90s, which would tell people things that were unambiguously good for them, like “go play outside”, in a mitigation effort for their negative effects. The Mormon church also ran a lot of these type of ads. This was intended to be the opposite form of social good, one with high leverage through a small positive effect on everybody. This sort of thing seems unrecognizable today in the corporate media.