The problem with journalistic doxxing that media figures only sort of understand is that they take advantage of superior capital and a relatively privileged place in society to engage in activism that can destroy lives; but the barriers to entry have shrunk.
It is not hard to find a lot of journalists' spouses and lives in general because they live prominent lives. This journalist works for ABC, his wife is an Obama staffer; this journalist works for NPR, her two husbands both work for SKDKnickerbocker, etc.
But where they live, where they vacation, where they send their kids to school, their parents' names, etc., is *slightly* less accessible to a single individual with a job or a life or even other things to do.
There is an enormous amount of data out there that is right in the public square, but it's buried by all the other information. Private investigators make bling in no small part on their ability to sift this data.
But a lot of people with varying amounts of time on their hands can do a lot of that work very quickly.
Right now, we have a social bias greater than the legal one that protects journalists from the negative consequences of their publication.
As it stands, journalists not only enjoy a high bar to prosecution and suit for their publication; they enjoy a social taboo against basically having their own tools turned on them.
If the last fifty years have taught us anything, it's that a taboo can be destroyed with determined effort, at greater and greater speeds.
Journalists have happened on the fastest way I can identify to drive Americans to say, "No, please, rando with a webpage, tell us all about this journalist's family so we can complain every time he writes a bad article."
A lot of journalists are weirdos, the childless kind, the unmarried kind, or both; but they will not all stay as such forever. Internet grudges, however, are forever.
Nothing I say here or indeed anywhere outside a courtroom matters much, so I'm mostly just laying down a marker for my future depression when some lady at NPR is weeping because some group of crazies published her kid's school bus schedule.
I will say this: The last few years have convinced me, more than ever, that social norms are the most powerful and at the same time the most delicate things in the world; and we are hurting ourselves by tearing them asunder.
