BuzzFeed Slack Chat Shows “Fuck CEN Consensus” As "Reporters" Built Case Against Agency

This BuzzFeed disclosure document is one of the very limited Slack conversations produced in the CEN litigation, despite BuzzFeed reportedly operating a newsroom culture in which much internal discussion took place on Slack. The document is therefore significant both for what it contains and for what its scarcity suggests: if Slack was a central newsroom communication tool, the production of only a tiny number of Slack conversations leaves this surviving extract as an unusually important glimpse of the informal atmosphere around CEN before publication. The conversation begins in October 2014, months before the article appeared, with Alan White discussing a MailOnline story about an Indian man castrated by a lynch mob. White says he emailed “Rega” about the story, says it “hadn’t been reported anywhere in India”, then states: “CEN are making stuff up” and adds that the viral news industry is republishing it “without question every single time”. A few minutes later, when another participant suggests doing “a straight debunk on that one story”, White says he had been thinking of doing “a longer thing on CEN and the production of viral news” but had realised it would be “basically impossible”. The exchange is revealing because the larger CEN narrative was already present before the reporting had been completed: White was moving from doubts about a single story towards a broader theory about CEN and viral news, while also acknowledging the difficulty of proving it. The tone then hardens. On 14 October, after a MailOnline link to a Chinese adultery story is shared, White asks: “woah is this CEN bollocks”, another participant says “CEN can’t be trusted with anything”, White says he “honestly” thinks CEN makes up “every single one of their stories”, and another user writes “hate cen”. Tom Phillips later joins the discussion, saying he is adding “another voice to the ‘fuck CEN’ consensus”, while another message notes: “so much hate for CEN noted we should all be off their news alerts now”. The same pattern continues later in October, with further comments including “god hate CEN”, “NO CEN NO”, “Shall we make pact never to do CEN story”, “HATE CEN”, “fucking cen”, “BOYCOTT” and “CEN”. One of the most important passages appears on 23 October, when the participants discuss the difficulty of proving the allegation. White says that “short of going to this village in the middle of nowhere” it is difficult, and another participant says CEN “deliberately choose impossible places to verify”. Another message sums up the problem bluntly: the story could end up as “CEN Are Probably Mostly Bullshit But We Can’t Really Prove It So ¯shrug emoticon”." That line is highly significant because it records an internal recognition, at least at that stage, that the suspicion was stronger than the proof. Yet the conversation also shows the team continuing to gather material and add examples to a CEN spreadsheet, including later references to a Metro cheating-husband story and a Mirror penis-chopping story. By 24 April 2015, publication has become a moment of celebration: one Slack user posts the BuzzFeed article link under the message “FUCKING PUBBED BITCHES”, others discuss tweeting it, putting it on Facebook, asking social to promote it, and note that “Ben and Luke” have already promoted or approved activity around it. The document is useful because it captures the informal newsroom attitude behind the formal published article: suspicion hardening into hostility, hostility becoming group consensus, and the eventual publication being celebrated and promoted as a newsroom win. It does not by itself prove that every participant acted improperly, and journalists are allowed to be sceptical, blunt and even sweary in private discussions. Its evidential value lies in the combination of tone, timing and uncertainty: months before publication, the Slack chat shows BuzzFeed staff already speaking as if CEN was inherently untrustworthy, while also acknowledging the difficulty of proving the wider allegation. Read with the wider disclosure record, this supports the argument that the final article grew out of an internal anti-CEN consensus rather than a neutral investigation that began with an open question and followed the evidence wherever it led

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