Allow me to submit for your fair-minded consideration the following "news diff" of a recent article from the venerable New York Times. Compare and contrast, if you will, these two timestamped versions of the "same" story on Ellen Pao's resignation from Reddit:

Comparing: It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit

Now you may not care about the goings on at Reddit, but be that as it may, this shoddy piece of yellow journalism perfectly exemplifies the narrative that pervades so much of today's news. What was once a merely slanted article entitled "Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief" was swiftly replaced by an outright propaganda piece painting Pao as a heroic but embattled warrior for equal rights in the midst of that oppressive white boy's club we call Silicon Valley, wherein she "fell victim" to the overwhelming sexism and racism which is both inherent to the tech scene and rampant among the vile Reddit userbase. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, yet an "op-ed" label somehow escaped this nakedly biased writeup.

In reality, Ellen Pao "fell victim" only to her own poor decisions, her own incompetence, her court-documented history of abusing coworkers and subordinates (male and female), her and her husband's shady grifter past of long-cons and frivolous discrimination suits seeking outrageous payoffs, her being completely out-of-touch with the very community she was brought in to manage, her intentionally vague and widely reviled initiative to transform all of Reddit into a so-called "safe space" (despite years of drastic increases in censorship across almost all of Reddit), her brazen double-standards in applying said policy to ban specific subreddits while leaving many more hateful, toxic, and rule-breaking subreddits untouched, her lack of desire to use Reddit or even understand how it works (in one celebrated instance, she actually tried linking to a message from her own inbox, like a boss), her off-site PR campaigns in defense of her bad decisions and policies on places like Buzzfeed (reviled by many Redditors) rather than engaging directly with the Reddit community (as challenging as that may be), her callous sacking of popular employees such as /u/kickme444 who ran Reddit's yearly secret santa gift exchange and was reportedly terminated because he had leukemia... even though he was able to work (he later deleted his story and said he'd only discuss it with Reddit Inc, so it would seem that Pao's legal team intimidated him into shutting up), and last but certainly not least her reply at a company meeting that "you'll have to pry this position from my cold, dead hands" upon being asked how the search for a permanent CEO was going (as alleged by another former employee). This list actually goes on and on; this was really just a high-level overview to illustrate what an incredible human being she is and what an amazing job she did as the interim CEO of an online community that was anathema to her.

In a word, Ellen Pao was nothing short of antithetical to the core values that Reddit and its community were founded upon and have historically espoused, as Pao herself hinted at when she announced her depature:

> "So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles."

Although Pao succeeded in alienating the vast majority of regulars that populate the site during her brief stint as CEO, the casus belli leading to her ultimate downfall was her sudden firing of Victoria Taylor, a universally beloved Reddit admin and crucial point of contact for moderators when conducting AMAs. The unexpected and flippant dismissal of Victoria for undisclosed but much-conjectured reasons triggered a sitewide revolt led by the site's moderators, who shutdown most major subreddits in protest of her firing, all culminating in a change.org petition for her ouster skyrocketing from 10k signatories over a few months to over 200k in just as many days. The majority of these moderators are very (if not radically) progressive, often to the point of being called "social justice warriors," meaning it's richly disingenuous to attribute Pao's departure to the clamor of right-wing trolls.

But none of that matters one wit because as everyone knows, Redditors hate nothing so much as they hate women and minorities (except fatties, perhaps). I mean seriously, have you even seen some of the vile names of those awful subreddits they let fester there?! Because if you haven't, the media will remind you of their names, again, and again, and again, as if these purposefully provocative subreddits, whose simmering popularity is first and foremost a result of ever-increasing censorship everywhere else, suddenly represent Reddit if and when anyone from an officially-sanctioned victim class waving a flag of ideological jihad comes under fire for being a world-class shitheel.

Never mind that what set off the final firestorm was the termination of a female employee. All of this hate couldn't possibly have anything to do with Pao's shady past, or her shady husband, or her terrible judgement, or her detested policies, or her nasty behavior, or her callous firings, or her ideological hubris, or her embrace of censorship, or her double-standards, or her lack of empathy and communication, or her awful leadership, or a staggering number of other failures. No, it couldn't possibly be any of that because as always, narrative uber alles. Now that Ellen Pao has been called a bunch of mean names by an army of anonymous trolls, we're stuck in the "poor Ellen" room, and neither her shady past nor her failures as interim CEO bear repeating nor need be scrutinized.

It's therefore a foregone conclusion that Redditors hated Pao because of her race and her gender and because she was a "fighter of sexism" who became "a hero to many." But what did this "hero" accomplish for women exactly? If firing rockstar female employees, banning salary negotiations, screening job candidates for ideological purity, imposing intentionally vague policies of censorship, and exhibiting all the hallmarks of a Harvard-league grifter before losing a $160 million "landmark" discrimination suit is somehow sufficient cause to be lauded as a brave crusader for social justice in the hallowed tradition of Martin Luther King and Susan B. Anthony, then our brave new world is in very big trouble.

Just how and why Reddit's board of directors selected such an inexperienced, ill-suited lightning-rod for mass-hatred to impose overwhelmingly unpopular site changes during a mere handoff period is anyone's best guess, but what we do know is that the seemingly appalling reactions to Pao's brief reign were anticipated well in advance by most reasonable and knowledgable observers of the situation. What's even worse is that the author of the original NYT article actually sallied forth into /r/KotakuInAction, that villainous hivemind of #gamergate misogynerds, ostensibly to conduct his own AMA, wherein he proceeded to dodge every upvoted question challenging the veracity of his <cough> narrative due to these aforementioned pesky facts and inconvenient truths, none of which somehow made it into the revised version of his article:

I'm Mike Isaac, the New York Times Reporter covering Reddit. AmA.

As you can see, the NYT wasn't even remotely interested in publishing the truth. In all likelihood, this so-called journalist merely stopped in to troll for hate speech and retreated upon finding himself incapable of inciting any salacious tidbits fit to be plastered over his next edition of agitprop masquerading as journalism. But that's just supposition, meaning it's something I would never publish as fact unless I were, you know, a journalist for the New York Times.

But wait, there's more! Here are some other shining examples of unvarnished journalistic integrity, starting with the highly esteemed Guardian:

Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving 'sickening' abuse from users

How Ellen Pao lost her job but survived Reddit's swamp of trolls

The Financial Times:

Pao quits Reddit after attacks on her leadership

The London Evening Standard:

Reddit chief Ellen Pao quits after 'sickening' abuse and death threats from users

ZDNet.com:

​Reddit CEO Ellen Pao resigns after week of 'sickening' attacks

DailyBeast (op-ed):

Reddit’s Terrorists Have Won: Ellen Pao and the Failure to Rebrand Web 2.0

Credit where credit is due though, NPR surprisingly ran a relatively even-handed piece. Let's just hope it stays that way.

Now I'm not saying that Pao didn't receive a huge outpouring of crude and spiteful messages, which she clearly did. But somehow I never saw any of these supposed death threats. Yes, there were some death wishes, but let's not conflate "eat shit and die" with "I'll murder you and your family." Such fine details, unfortunately, didn't deter Sam Altman of Reddit's board of directors from dutifully and publicly shaming the Reddit community over their supposed death threats, as though hate mail to polarizing figures in the public eye is unheard of, and as if any would-be murderers reading his patronizing bromide could be dissuaded from sending death threats in the first place. But of course that was not the point of his handwringing exercise in public relations.

Altman's finger-wagging screed in hand, the media had all it needed to run with the narrative that Redditors are literally terrorists, ie. #gamerate redux. And boy did they run. All of these histrionic hyperbolae and identity politics and psychodramas are part and parcel of the media's stock in trade, which is why all of this was predicted well in advance by those following the situation, many of whom are by now all too familiar with its played-out professional victim routine. Manufactured outrage and clueless moral panic from the mainstream media are nothing new to those of us who have lived and breathed old-school internet culture most of our lives. We never forgive and we never forget such classics as: DOOM caused Columbine. Anonymous: hackers on steroids. Over 9000 penises. Pool's closed. The hacker known as 4chan. #Gamergate. And so on, and so forth, and so the dragon must be slain over and over and over again, even in our present, supposedly internet-savvy age. Most disturbing of all is that with each manic news cycle, the dragon only grows larger, nastier, and more adept at dividing our society against itself to devour piecemeal both our liberties and our capacity for meaningful and authentic dialog.

https://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3d4w47/opinion_narrative_engineering_101/