MARK JUDGE: The ‘toxic’ media of the early 2000s hasn’t changed, but its targets have.

The new book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Tabloid 2000s is a fantastic piece of cultural analysis. Written by British journalist Sarah Ditum, it explores the digital revolution of the early 21st century and how it intersected with feminism, celebrity, and tabloid journalism — to the detriment of young women.

The thesis of Toxic is simple enough: In the late 1990s, the kind of privacy once enjoyed by the famous evaporated with the arrival of the internet. The coverage of women such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Aaliyah, and Janet Jackson was not only intrusive but vicious, violent, and unprecedented.

After roughly a decade, the power shifted back to celebrities’ favor with the rise of social media, which allowed celebrities to be their own public relations firms and direct their fans to counterattack the press. This new position of power, however, has flaws, namely letting celebrities avoid hard questions and the immolation of anyone who questions #MeToo or the new feminist orthodoxy.

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As Ditum concedes, the correction to the “Upskirt Decade” has had its own problems. Notably, innocent people have been destroyed by false accusations — and banning a song like “Blurred Lines” is never the answer.

It is also just a fact that the same irresponsible, strafing media is still at work. It’s just shifted its attention to politics. “These moments did not signify justice, exactly,” Ditum writes of the new witch hunts, where the press napalms anybody they don’t like, “but they did represent a change: the snark, spite, and violation that had been part of the acceptable treatment of celebrities (particularly women) were no longer to be tolerated.”

I’m not sure that it’s any better if the snark, spite, and violation are now happening to people who aren’t famous.

CNN, which spent the Trump years doxxing any random individual who disagreed with their leftist worldview, doesn’t mind, though.