Executive suites and social justice at the NYT, one draft at a time

Get me rewrite! The New York Times’s initial story on the departure of interim chief executive Ellen Pao from social media community Reddit lacked egregious bias, so the paper went back to insert some. (More: Twitchy, citing my Twitter contribution.) Amid widespread mockery of the second version’s opinionated tone, the paper then published yet a third version pulling back from some of its friskier social justice pronouncements. Pao, as readers may recall, was the plaintiff in an earlier Silicon Valley suit over alleged gender discrimination and retaliation, a suit that failed before a jury but drew much favorable coverage along the way in the NYT and elsewhere.

2 Comments

  • Regarding Pao, nowhere have I read among several articles that just maybe Pao was an inadequate leader and manager which led to her ouster. I’ve read all sorts of extrinsic factors posed by writers but nothing about her core capability to effectively lead a corporation. What do we know of her professional successes? Her ability to lead large organizations? We do know of her visible and recent failures.

  • […] egregious bias… Amid widespread mockery of the second version’s opinionated tone, the paper then published yet a third version pulling back from some of its friskier social justice […]