Good vs. Evil: Who is who?
by Emma Williamson and Chelsey Macaulay
The Build-Up
Michael Leidig is a British journalist. He is also the co-founder and current owner of The Central European News, a small British news agency. This is also the agency that is suing BuzzFeed at the moment. After BuzzFeed's article was published, Leidig claimed that BuzzFeed reporter Alan White had contacted him in the beginning about writing an article, that was to be a feature on CEN's admirable investigative journalism, not about slamming his whole business. Alan White had also written an email to Leidig saying, "As I mentioned previously, I understand that you are producing this viral content for sale in order to fund your laudable (admirable) investigative journalism" and "I am keen to reflect this in the article." So, BuzzFeed did give Leidig a heads up about an article, but they didn't give him an apparent truthful one.
The Article
As we have said, the title wasn't a very nice one and the 7,000 word article doesn't get much better. BuzzFeed was quoted stating, "In all, we evaluated 41 CEN pieces that struck us as particularly attention-grabbing. Of those, 11 proved to be completely false or to be based on images that did not match the stories; 8 more contained suspicious details such as perfect quotes that appeared in no other coverage; 13 we were unable to verify either way; and 9 appeared to be real or mostly real."