Rico isn't alone, it seems

The New York Times has a Media article about an angry young man:

The Internet has given us many glorious things: streaming movies, multiplayer games, real-time information, and videos of cats playing the piano. It has also offered up some less edifying creations: web-borne viruses, cybercrime and Charles C. Johnson (photo).
His name came out of nowhere and now seems to be everywhere. When the consumer Internet first unfolded, there was much talk about millions of new voices blooming. Johnson is one of those flowers. His tactics may have as much in common with ultimate fighting as journalism, but that doesn’t mean he is not part of the conversation.
Johnson, a 26-year-old blogger based in California, has worked his way to the white-hot center of the controversy over a Rolling Stone article about rape accusations made by a student at the University of Virginia. His instinct that the report was deeply flawed was correct, but he proceeded to threaten on Twitter to expose the student and then later named her. And he serially printed her photo while going after her in personal and public ways.
In the frenzy to discredit her, he published a Facebook photo of someone he said was the same woman at a rally protesting an earlier rape. Oops; different person. He did correct himself, but the damage, now to two different women, was done.
Before that, his targets were two reporters for The New York Times who, he said, revealed the address of the police officer in the Ferguson, Missouri shooting. (They didn’t. They published the name of a street he once lived on, which had already been published in The Washington Post and other media outlets.) Before that, he attacked the victim of the shooting, Michael Brown.
Before that, he attacked Senator Cory Booker, saying the lawmaker did not live in Newark when he was the city’s mayor; BuzzFeed wrote that Johnson was not only wrong, but had worked for a political action committee that opposed Booker. He also wrote a series of Twitter messages that suggested President Obama was gay. He offered money for photos of Senator Thad Cochran’s wife in her nursing home bed. Before that, well, it doesn’t really matter; you get the pattern.
He is not without some talent; he effectively ended the career of the rising foreign policy analyst Elizabeth O’Bagy after exposing her conflicts of interest and fudged academic credentials. In general, he has a knack for staking an outrageous, attacking position on a prominent news event, then pounding away until he is noticed. It is one way to go, one that says everything about the corrosive, underreported news era we are living through.
In a phone call, he made it clear that he sees himself as part of the vanguard of Internet news, although he did add that some of what he is up to is a response to a lifetime of slights. “I’m basically one of those kids who was bullied all his life,” he said. He’s now extracting payback, one post at a time.
Much of what he publishes is either wrong or tasteless, but that matters little to Johnson or his audience, which responds by forming mobs on Twitter, or using the personal information to put fake ads on Craigslist to chase after the targets he points to.
After watching him set off a series of small mushroom clouds, it struck me that he might be the ultimate expression of a certain kind of citizen journalism, but one far more toxic than we’re accustomed to seeing. Once a promising young conservative voice who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller, and The Blaze, Johnson has a loose-cannon approach that alienated many of his editors. There was a time when that would have been the end of it but, with Twitter as a promotional platform, he has been able to build his own site called GotNews.
His most vociferous critics are on the right because they think his outrageous tactics bring disrepute to the conservative cause. But many— like the studios in Hollywood who have stood by watching the cyberattack on Sony unfold without emitting a peep— do not want to speak on the record for fear they will end up in his gun sights. (One exception was a Daily Caller contributor, Matt K. Lewis, who called out The Washington Post for what he characterized as a “romanticizing” profile of Johnson.)
Recently, Johnson told me he was going to sue many of his media tormentors, but all things considered, it has been a pretty good run of attention for the once obscure blogger. When I spoke to him, he was feeling a bit hunted and fighting off a cold, but cheerful in the main, saying his grandiose plans to become the next Matt Drudge— or Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst, two others he mentioned— were humming along smoothly. “I’m in talks with investors right now, and I think we’ve already got the deal set up,” he said. “Basically I’m building a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded media company that is going to take all the people like me— autistics, researchers, nerds, ex-law enforcement, whistle-blowers— and we’re going to give them an opportunity to make money on the information that they have.”
He can now push the button on almost anything that has heat, a scent of scandal or the ability to activate his base of angry, conspiratorial readers, who believe the Republic is being overwhelmed by criminals, feminists, and the politicians who enable them. And then the rest of the journalistic establishment (including me) points a crooked finger at the naughty young man who is using his mouse to sow mayhem.
In that sense, Johnson shares some common characteristics with the so-called mood slime in Ghostbusters II, which lived underneath New York City and gathered strength by feeding on the anger coursing through the streets above it. He would be just one more person hurling invective from a basement somewhere if not for all of us— his fans, his enabling social media platforms and his critics in the news media— who have created this troll on steroids.
Although he was temporarily suspended from Twitter for publishing the personal information of others, he’s back on that site preaching to anyone who will listen. I’d ignore him if I thought he would go away, but I get the feeling he won’t.
In conversation, Johnson is prone to narcissism, not uncommon in media types, but he has his own special brand of it. He sees himself as a major character in a great unfolding epoch, dwelling on his school-age accomplishments and his journalism awards and vaguely suggesting that he has strong ties to many levels of law enforcement. Like what, I asked? “Have you ever read the book or heard of the book Encyclopedia Brown?” he asked, referring to a series about a boy detective. “That’s the capacity in which I help them. I don’t go out of my way to discuss the kind of, shall we say, clandestine work I do, because the nature of the work has to be clandestine in order for it be effective.” He intimated that he had experienced some blowback and that he now felt under threat. “People are trying to kill me and my family members,” he said.
In view of that, I asked him about publishing the home addresses of two Times journalists after erroneously claiming they had reported the address of the Ferguson policeman who shot Brown. “I didn’t say they published his address,” he said. Yes, he did. He said that reporters “published the address of Darren Wilson in The New York Times, so here are their addresses.” Moving on, he said that before releasing their personal information, he contacted some friends in law enforcement and told them, “We got to make sure these guys are protected in Chicago and elsewhere, but this is what I’m going to do.” Gee, thanks for that.
The reporters and their families were forced to vacate their homes after facing threats of robbery and rape. I asked what he thought about that. “It doesn’t feel great, I’ll be honest with you, but I also don’t see it as fundamentally my fault,” he said. “Look, a lot of people are upset with me,” he said, adding, “my batting average is very, very good. Have I got up to the plate and either hit the ball wrong or swung and missed? Yeah, absolutely, but I take risks that other people won’t take because I think the story requires it.”
Those are very noble words arrayed over some nasty handiwork. My worry is that people who have made it this far in the column will click over to GotNews to see what all the fuss is about.
What they will find is a clear look into the molten core of a certain mind-set, a place where conspiracies are legion, victims are portrayed as perpetrators, and so-called news is a fig leaf on a far darker art.

Rico says he knows his Rant doesn't have the readership this guy gets, but he's not interested in dabbling in stuff like this...