You're right, I was thinking of "slammed" as being part of take-down style news reporting.

Looking at Google Ngram, usage of "slams" started inflecting upwards in the early 90's and then even more strongly in the mid-2000's. [0] I wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.

(I looked at "slams" rather than "slammed" to try to avoid some of the other modern meanings, like being slammed with work.)

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slams&year_sta...