How is the gif incitement to violence though? Its a satyrical meme made from a goddamn WWE event thing in which Trump took part in. A WWE meme.
Its like if I pasted the image of someone over the black knight's scene from Monthy Python (when he gets his limbs chopped off) and someone called that incitement to violence.
EDIT: turns out CNN may actualy have threatened the wrong person, too, and the guy they found only cropped the original gif, which was created by someone else.
Eh... they're journalists. The law is supposed to err on the side of defending them. If a journalist couldn't reveal your identify or personal info without your consent, making for example documentaries would be an almost impossible legal minefield. Investigative journalism has always involved skirting or breaking the law, its allowed to on purpose because there's no other way to protect journalistic freedoms. I doubt he could sue CNN on anything other than a technicality. This isn't blackmail because the damaging info was never secret to begin with (and it was released willingly to the public by the user in question). And AFAIK the law does not protect private citizens even slightly from having their personal information revealed by journalists. If it did they would get sued for defamation every time they released a suspect's photo and the person turned out to be innocent.
I actually disagree with you about doing this privately. By doing it in the open they have *slightly* done something journalistic (by adding to an existing story, even if it is just talking about themselves mostly), and they've been open and honest about what they did. So they're at least willing to take the heat for this, and possibly change in the future. As I said before their actions were unacceptable but by doing it in the open, and by doing something less harmful than doxxing, they at least have some tiny excuse. Doing this in private would be completely unjustifiable.
As for it being a WWE meme, don't see why that matters even slightly. Ironic speech is still speech. And all the time people do stupid shit and get turned into public figures without their consent. Person says something dumb or falls over or whatever, someone films it on their smartphone, youtube channel that's just someone's name releases a video with a CAPITAL LETTER TITLE and it goes viral, 3 years later mid level internet news site releases an article like "we've tracked down the guy that said UFOs were real and then fell off his bike!" The thing is, if you're OK with say watching hidden camera pranks or dash cam videos of car crashes, why would you not be OK with people being doxxed? Doesn't some guy driving to work have an expectation of anonymity just like someone on the internet? The only reason I would be unhappy about this guy getting doxxed is because I prefer media not be used for public embarrassment in general. This guy didn't expect Trump to turn his shitpost into a national level news item, and it wouldn't be very nice of CNN to doxx him (which, again, they didn't). If he was, say, a big name youtuber then fuck yeah I'd be OK with him taking some heat for this.