That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.

GamerGate wasn’t doing that work and they distracted mightily from it. For example, the much-hated Kotaku was actually doing reporting which got them black listed so not only was GamerGate not contributing there, they were actually harming the people who were:

https://kotaku.com/a-price-of-games-journalism-1743526293

Even if they had also been involved, it would not excuse the abusive behavior.