BuzzFeed UK Editor Uses KFC Story To Frame CEN As Supplying Fake News To “Stripped-Back Newsrooms”

This internal BuzzFeed email from 3 December 2014 shows Luke Lewis responding to Alan White’s invitation to edit an early working Google Doc about CEN. Lewis suggests that BuzzFeed should count how many outlets had covered some of the stories under review, giving the example of the “KFC story”, which he says “must have been hundreds”. He adds that this would convey “the scale of the demand for this stuff in stripped-back newsrooms” while avoiding “pointing the finger at particular publishers”. The document is significant because it captures BuzzFeed’s thinking at an early stage of the CEN investigation. At this point, the KFC story was being treated as an example that could help show how supposedly dubious CEN material had spread widely through the media ecosystem. BuzzFeed’s focus had already moved beyond whether the individual story was true or false, and towards using its spread to illustrate a wider argument about publishers, demand for viral material, and reduced newsroom capacity. That matters because the KFC story was later removed from the article after BuzzFeed discovered it was not a fake story. Instead of being retained as a counter-example showing that a widely circulated CEN story could be true, the entire reference disappeared. The email therefore helps show how an early assumption — that a heavily published CEN story must represent a problem — shaped the wider narrative before the underlying facts were fully established. The wording is also important because Lewis explicitly discusses the media partners who had used the story. His suggestion was to show the scale of demand without “pointing the finger at particular publishers”. That is revealing because the article was being framed not only around CEN, but also around the stripped-back newsrooms and publishers that used CEN material. It illustrates how the story sat close to BuzzFeed’s commercial and editorial rivalry with established publishers, while still being presented as a neutral investigation into accuracy.

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