This is true, but it's also true our culture glorifies, idolizes and hero-worships the crap out of celebrities of all sorts. By my estimation, the latter is more popular than the former, and the nasty stuff mostly stems from politics. The feeling that it leans one way or the other probably depends heavily on the people/new sources you interact with most regularly. If your daily life involves handling complaints from a university humanities department, for example, there might be more demonization than saintification.

It also seems people are much more tolerant of and ready to engage with negativity online than in person, so perhaps the terminally online trend is a driver.