I think it had its roots in the civil rights movement, where the key concept- that racial discrimination is bad morphed into ALL discrimination is bad including intellectual and physical ability, hence the handing out of awards to everyone for participating in an activity and the dumbing-down of school grades in a misguided effort to spare the self-esteem of the less "abled".
In a classic example, right wing Xtian nuts have seized on the recent inability to discriminate against stupid ideas and started pushing ID to be taught along side (and presumably to replace) evolution as if the two concepts were intellectually equivalent.
In this case, a crap result was called out as such. No names were mentioned, so only those who participated in producing the crap (they know who they are) had their self-esteem taken down a notch.