This 23 March 2015 email exchange gives further context to BuzzFeed’s earlier note that experienced Eastern Europe correspondents had not heard of CEN. Tom Phillips tells Alan White that Miriam Elder had “never heard of” CEN and that Max had also never heard of the agency. The “Max” is Max Seddon, who was then a foreign affairs reporter for BuzzFeed News based in Moscow and had already covered Russia and Ukraine for BuzzFeed and the Associated Press; he later became the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief. That background matters because Seddon was not a casual observer or junior generalist, but a serious foreign correspondent working in one of the regions where CEN was supposedly notorious for fake international viral stories. The document is significant because it undercuts the idea that CEN was publicly well known as a major source of fake viral news, at least among experienced correspondents covering relevant parts of Europe. It also implies that those correspondents had not heard of the CEN stories BuzzFeed later framed around the “King of Bullshit News” line, 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.