On Eve of Publishing BuzzFeed Still Treats Bieber Bear Attack As Its Strongest CEN Example

This 31 March 2015 email chain shows Heidi Blake commenting on the near-final BuzzFeed CEN draft after Alan White invited her to review it. The key point is that, after months of work by a senior BuzzFeed team, the Bieber bear attack story was still being treated as the strongest or safest lead example for the article. Blake says the Bieber story is presumably placed near the top because BuzzFeed had “not nailed the provenance of the copy” on the only other contender, the Lucita Sandoval story, while saying the latter would be a better opening if CEN could be made to confirm it. The significance is that BuzzFeed’s strongest available example, as well as being months old and already widely published, was itself compromised by BuzzFeed’s own prior conduct: BuzzFeed had also liked and used the Bieber bear attack story at the time, and had apparently not realised it needed correcting when other publishers later updated their versions. The document therefore shows the weakness of the evidential base late in the process: despite extensive online searching, outreach and work by a senior reporting/editing team, BuzzFeed had not found a stronger lead example than a story it had itself published and benefited from, while criticising rivals for doing the same.

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