The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
The author is now being deliberately disingenuous.
How so? Farhad is not Rebecca. She may be, as we speak, still completely unaware of Farhad's e-mail exchange with Alexis.
"Oh, uh, it fell through."
"Oh, ok."
I can think of hundreds of other variations of the same exchange that don't include negligence on the author's part. This isn't a cross examination - which is the price we pay when we gleefully shoved a knife in the chest of real journalism and twisted it hard, and went and partied with blogs afterward.
The context of "dropped out" is universally "The person went from participating to not participating". Alexis was never participating.
Dropping out means that you were planning to go and then you had to cancel. Whether Farhad knew this before or not, Alexis's email was very clear and so there's no excuse to claim today that Alexis dropped out of anything.