Ellen Pao is back in the news, as is her husband – and the reporting on her latest difficulties to be found in Pravda-on-the-Hudson is quite instructive.

As some of you will remember, there was a great deal of hoopla back in late March about the verdict in a lawsuit for $16 million that Pao had launched for gender discrimination against her employer Kleinfeld, Perkins, Caufield & Byers after the venture capital firm had decided not to make her a partner. The case had stirred considerable interest among feminists working in Silicon Valley who were eager to cash in. But – to their shock and dismay – the jury decided for the defendant on all counts; and the judge ordered Pao to pay $276,000 of the legal costs incurred by the firm.

In the interim, Pao’s husband Buddy Fletcher, an African-American hedge fund manager, ran into trouble. As Michelle Celorier explained on Sunday in The New York Post,

On June 30, three years after Fletcher was forced to put his hedge fund into Chapter 11, he was socked with a $50 million judgment to repay investors. . . . His hedge fund firm, Fletcher Asset Management, has been labeled a Ponzi scheme by the bankruptcy trustee amid allegations Fletcher transferred millions to himself and to friends. While Fletcher over the last three years appeared immune from getting nicked for his actions, the $50 million judgment entered by a Manhattan judge is the closest he has come to paying for the alleged fraud against his investors, which included Louisiana firefighter and cop pensions. He has appealed the decision.

Fletcher is no less litigious than his wife. He owns four apartments in the Dakota, which Celorier nicely describes as “the iconic Manhattan apartment building overlooking Central Park at 72nd Street.” When he sought to buy a fifth, the board turned him down, and he launched a racial discrimination lawsuit – which is apt to be dismissed. As Celorier reports,

Lawyers for the 131-year-old building said in court papers that it wasn’t racial discrimination that led the board to refuse to allow Fletcher to buy a fifth apartment, but the investor’s deteriorating finances. “He was looting his own company and defrauding his investors,” Dakota lawyer Christine Chung pointed out in court papers, referencing the Chapter 11. The SEC and the FBI are investigating, sources said. In 2010, as he applied to purchase his fifth apartment in the 94-unit building, Fletcher had $8 million in assets, including $50,000 in cash — but $20 million in liabilities, court documents show. He needed $5.7 million in cash to buy the apartment. “When you looked at the financials, he was broke,” Dakota board member Richard Robb said in a deposition.

To add to the couple’s woes, this past Friday, 11 days after her husband was asked to pony up a cool $50 million, Pao was ousted as interim chief of Reddit – where her firing of another woman, who was exceedingly popular with the members who actually run and operate the popular website, stirred up a rebellion on their part.

What makes this development especially interesting is less Pao’s fate than the story’s treatment in Pravda-on-the-Hudson. If you go to the website of the latter, you will find an article posted on Friday by Mike Isaac and David Streitfeld – entitled “It’s Silicon Vally 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism is Out at Reddit” – purporting to be a news story. It begins in the following fashion:

Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley. But sentiment is a fickle thing. Late Friday she fell victim to a crowd demanding her ouster as chief executive of the popular social media site Reddit. Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists. The debates over diversity in technology and invective on the Internet have been simmering for a long time, but they’ve boiled over in the last year. One reason is Ms. Pao’s lawsuit against her former employer, the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Her gender discrimination case, years in the making, failed to sway a jury, but did reveal a community that casually tolerated an atmosphere where machismo was prized and women often seemed to be relegated to secondary roles. The dispute at Reddit, which arose from the dismissal of a well-liked employee earlier this month, drew much of its intensity from Ms. Pao’s lawsuit — and her gender. “The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” said Sam Altman, a member of the Reddit board. “And that’s just a shame against humanity.” More than 213,000 people signed a petition demanding Ms. Pao’s resignation. After her departure was announced, Reddit users celebrated in an over-the-top fashion. “Rejoice internet brethren,” wrote one. “The great evil has been slain.”

Note what is missing from the opening paragraphs of this account. We are not told that the judge in the gender discrimination case ordered Pao to pay the legal costs of the defendants (something that is ordinarily not done unless a lawsuit is frivolous). Even more to the point, we are not told that the “well-liked employee” Pao dismissed was a woman. To learn these pertinent facts, one must read on and on. Moreover, in the article, not one word is said concerning the recent judgment against her husband. Nor is anything said concerning his lawsuit for racial discrimination against the Dakota. In short, items of interest that tell against “the narrative” that Pravda is pushing have been relegated to the end of the piece or left out altogether.

There is more. The article now found on the Pravda website is a replacement for a report – entitled “Ellen Pao is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief” – posted two hours earlier by Mike Isaac alone – and, thanks to a wonderful website called NewsDiffs, you can compare the two.

Isaac, who is apparently a real reporter or who has not yet learned how to operate at Pravda, wrote,

Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned from the online message board on Friday after a week of ceaseless criticism from scores of angry users over the handling of an employee departure. Ms. Pao will be replaced by Steve Huffman, who, along with Alexis Ohanian, started Reddit from a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Boston a decade ago. Ms. Pao said she would remain as an adviser to Reddit’s board for the remainder of the year. Her exit, which the company described as a mutual agreement between her and Reddit’s board, follows a week of unrest in the Reddit community, which is made up of more than 160 million regular users who use the site to talk about anything from current events to viral cat photos. Ms. Pao characterized her departure as a result of a disagreement with Reddit’s board on the future of the company. “It became clear that the board and I had a different view on the ability of Reddit to grow this year,” Ms. Pao said in an interview.” Because of that, it made sense to bring someone in that shared the same view.” Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board, said he personally appreciated Ms. Pao’s efforts during her two years working at the start-up. “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said. Reddit, now based in San Francisco, is composed of topics-based forums, known as subreddits, where discussions take place on subjects like news and technology. The company has 70 to 80 employees and relies largely upon its thousands of dedicated power users to govern the site. This tight-knit community erupted into upheaval when the news broke that Victoria Taylor, a prominent and well-liked Reddit employee, had been abruptly dismissed from the company with no public explanation. Many Reddit users blamed Ms. Pao directly in the hours after Ms. Taylor’s firing, flooding Reddit’s forums with vitriolic messages – often racist and misogynistic – calling for Ms. Pao’s ouster. Reddit users circulated an online petition calling for her removal that garnered more than 200,000 signatures. Ms. Pao apologized to the site’s members for the episode earlier this week. Reddit’s management made errors, “not just on July 2, but also over the past several years,” Ms. Pao said in a post on one of the site’s forums on Monday. “The mods” — moderators — “and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of Reddit.” Ms. Pao has long been a figure of controversy in Silicon Valley. In March, she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she had previously worked. The trial, which involved big-name Silicon Valley investors such as John Doerr, mesmerized Silicon Valley with its salacious details while also amplifying concerns about a lack of diversity in the technology industry.

As you can see, Isaac provides readers with almost all of the pertinent facts – including the decidedly nasty and unpleasant tone of some of the comments concerning Pao – without any partisan spin. He is resolutely neutral on the Kleiner Perkins case, and he does not bury in the last few paragraphs anything essential for understanding what is really going on. The only thing of any moment that he leaves out is the story concerning the conduct of Ellen Pao’s husband – which, to be fair, is more germane to understanding her litigiousness than it is to what happened at Reddit. These two affirmative-action babies appear to be quite a pair.

About the only legitimate criticism that one could make of Isaac’s original piece is that it failed to draw on the highly informative article – entitled “Ellen Pao and Victoria Taylor Find Themselves on Opposite Ends of the Great Reddit Revolt” – that Brigit Katz posted on the Pravda site on 8 July. When you have read Katz’ account of the character of Reddit, which is a completely open forum where politically incorrect (and even vile) commentary is allowed, of the effectiveness of Taylor as a site administrator, and of her relations with the dedicated volunteers who moderate the forums (“subreddits”) on the website, you can easily see why her dismissal stirred a rebellion and Pao eventually got the boot.

There is, I suspect, another story yet to be told — concerning the discomfort of the left-liberal founders of Reddit with the politically incorrect commentary that it generates — but my guess is that Pravda will never divulge this tale. It might — horribile dictu! — reveal the degree to which today’s left-liberals have embraced censorship.

Overall, however, I would say that the most compelling reason to be interested in this story is what it tells us about news management on the part of Pravda – where disinformation is the order of the day and partisan spin is frequently apt to trump accurate reporting and impartial analysis. In this case, you can actually watch Pravda‘s editors at work. The next time that you read a story in that rag you should ask yourself: “How are those in charge trying to manipulate me?”