BuzzFeed Buries Its Own Use of CEN News While Noting Eastern Europe Correspondents Never Heard Of CEN

This 23 March 2015 email chain shows Tom Phillips and Alan White editing the BuzzFeed CEN draft while discussing how to handle BuzzFeed’s own previous use of CEN material. Phillips says his “fave note” in the draft is “CUT ALL OF THIS”, then agrees that this may be where they “drop the bulk” of the section dealing with BuzzFeed having “done some of this material” and the fact that he had used CEN material in a previous job. The document is significant because it appears to show BuzzFeed solving the problem of its own CEN use not by fully explaining the practical relationship, but by reducing or removing discussion of it while later denying in the published article that BuzzFeed was a CEN customer. The second important point is Phillips’s message saying he had asked Miriam Elder whether she had ever had a run-in with CEN, and that she had “never heard of them”, before adding that if experienced Eastern Europe correspondents had never heard of CEN, that was “almost as lol” as if they had. That point has wider legal significance: if senior correspondents working in relevant regions had not heard of CEN, despite BuzzFeed’s framing of CEN as a major source of fake viral news, it tends to support the view that CEN was not widely known to the public in the way BuzzFeed’s later US defence would need to establish. The document is therefore useful both for the “client/customer” issue and for the public-profile threshold issue: internally, BuzzFeed was cutting down its own-use problem while also recording that experienced journalists in CEN’s supposed operating areas did not know CEN.

Source

Part of Central European News & Mike Leidig v BuzzFeed (US Second Circuit Libel Case) – BF Case Documents

Europe Media Published 1 May 2026 at 21:09 Source: 1 November 2016