Ms. Pao’s departure from Reddit was prompted after the online message board’s tight-knit community broke into upheaval when news broke that Victoria Taylor, a prominent and well-liked Reddit employee, had been suddenly dismissed from the company this month with no public explanation. In protest, Reddit users shut down hundreds of sections of the message board.
This graf:
* Establishes an objective cause of Pao's ouster --- the firing of Victoria Taylor --- that Pao's opponents widely agree is the reason she left.
* Calls into question the reason for Taylor's firing.
* Reports the subreddit strike, which was done precisely to get this sort of attention.
At no point does the graf downplay the firing or somehow mitigate Pao's involvement in it. Which it easily could have, because Pao didn't fire Taylor, Ohanian did.
I do not think you can win an argument that the Times tried to spin the Victoria Taylor issue out of the article.
The article also ignores the fact that Pao didn't fire Taylor, and that the issue of how AMAs were going to be moderated was in Ohanian's portfolio, not hers.
That fact is more material to the article than the specifics of the moderator complaints about Taylor --- for instance, it speaks to the difficult situation Pao was in managing a team that included Reddit's charismatic founder and the chairman of the company, in an operational role. But it also isn't in the article.
Ms. Pao’s departure from Reddit was prompted after the online message board’s tight-knit community broke into upheaval when news broke that Victoria Taylor, a prominent and well-liked Reddit employee, had been suddenly dismissed from the company this month with no public explanation. In protest, Reddit users shut down hundreds of sections of the message board.
This graf:
* Establishes an objective cause of Pao's ouster --- the firing of Victoria Taylor --- that Pao's opponents widely agree is the reason she left.
* Calls into question the reason for Taylor's firing.
* Reports the subreddit strike, which was done precisely to get this sort of attention.
At no point does the graf downplay the firing or somehow mitigate Pao's involvement in it. Which it easily could have, because Pao didn't fire Taylor, Ohanian did.
I do not think you can win an argument that the Times tried to spin the Victoria Taylor issue out of the article.