This 23 March 2015 email exchange shows Tom Phillips telling Alan White that Miriam Elder had “never heard of” CEN and that Max had also never heard of the agency. Phillips adds that it occurs to him that “if loads of experienced correspondents in eastern europe have never heard of them” that is “almost as lol” as if they had, with White replying: “Haha.” The document is significant because it undercuts the idea that CEN was publicly well known as a supposed major source of fake viral news, at least among experienced correspondents working in relevant regions. Its evidential value is not that CEN was unknown to everyone, but that BuzzFeed itself was recording, before publication, that senior or experienced journalists in the relevant geographic field had not heard of the agency. That also implies they had not heard of the CEN stories BuzzFeed was later branding around the “King of Bullshit News” frame, despite those stories supposedly being examples of a notorious fake-news operation. The point matters in the wider legal and reputational context because BuzzFeed later relied on a much larger public-profile framing of CEN, while this internal exchange suggests the opposite: CEN was not necessarily a widely recognised public actor even among journalists who might have been expected to know it if BuzzFeed’s framing had already reflected common knowledge.