It’s sad that it’s come to this, but this is the state of the media.

One of the more noxious #resistance habits of the media has been doxxing conservatives by running hit pieces on ordinary people who happen to be active on social media, and then getting them or their spouses fired, their family members harassed, etc..

The most notorious of these stories targeted Amymek, an ordinary Twitter user whose crime was talking about Islamic terrorism and being retweeted by President Trump. (Google, in a blatant lack of consideration for user safety, keeps the Huffington Post hit piece and derivatives of it, such as the New York Times follow-up, ranker higher than Amy’s own Twitter account.)

Now the media wonders why it was banned from an address database.

Journalists Have Been Banned From A Powerful Database That Lets You Search People’s Phone Numbers And Addresses

Until now, Trace IQ let journalists search names, phone numbers and addresses in one database – now they’ve been banned, but other groups, such as debt collectors, haven’t.

It says something that reporters are abusing the database worse than debt collectors.

The Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, James Harkin, said the industry has come under threat from legislation in recent times, pointing to the Investigatory Powers Act passed in 2016 and the proposed Espionage Act.

But Harkin said Lexis Nexis’ decision to shut out journalists from Trace IQ shows investigative journalism can also be gagged by the new “popular anxieties about privacy”.

“In many ways concerns about the Data Protection Act, and concerns about data protection more generally, are more subtle and more insidious, and more directly relevant to the day-to-day work of journalists,” Harkin told BuzzFeed News.

The context for this is European, but it has obvious implications in the US.

But to the media, people’s desire for privacy is an unwarranted anxiety.