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ATTENTION PLEASE. I’d like to talk about something that’s been hanging over me for a while. It’s been stressful, infuriating but ultimately one of the most satisfying things that’s happened this year. (And no, it's nowt to do with Brexit.)
Four years ago, I was at @BuzzFeedNews as its first UK news director. In April 2015, we published our first big investigation – ‘The King of Bullshit News’, about a guy called Michael Leidig and the news agency he owned called CEN. You can read it here buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/cent…
It's an extraordinary story (please do read it). @aljwhite, @flashboy & @CraigSilverman spent months on this, making sure they were incredibly confident about their work.
Once I came on board, I went through editing it line by line, pushing them to make sure we were confident we could defend each and every point we made. We brought in a great (and very expensive) libel lawyer.
When we published it, we weren’t sure anyone would care. Maybe we were the only ones who got outraged by this stuff? We were drained, exhausted, nervous. And then the story came out, and the reaction made it all worthwhile.
And then, a few months later, Leidig sued. For $11 million.
By that point, I was no longer at BuzzFeed. They said that if I got drawn into the case, they would cover my legal bills. But still – it wasn’t pretty. Having to give a deposition on pain of perjury. Likely having to fly to New York to testify.
Above all, knowing that if I had somehow fucked up, somehow failed to do all the due diligence I needed to, it would cost millions and severely damage the reputation of some great journalists and great people.
Yesterday, the judge published his verdict. It was the most satisfying 35 pages of legalese I have ever had the privilege to read. You can find it here documentcloud.org/documents/5782…
The judge went through every single one of Leidig’s/CEN’s eight claims against our reporting, and found that there was not a shred of evidence against us. He pointed out that of 216 factual statements in BuzzFeed’s legal deposition, Leidig’s team contested only one.
He said there was no point even taking the case before a jury, because ‘for each of the eight statements that comprise Plaintiffs’ libel claims, no reasonable juror could find the statement or its reasonable implications false’.
He referred to Leidig’s ‘self-serving and discredited testimony’. You get the picture.
That quote, btw, was because the guy who Leidig claimed wrote one of the stories we said was bollocks (about depressed Chinese people talking cabbages for a walk) didn’t even work for him until two months after it was published.
In the grand scheme of things, this might not seem like it matters. But it has real-world consequences.
In a follow-up piece, Alan went to Poland to interview those involved in a CEN story about a drunk Santa who’d crashed his sleigh – a piece of throwaway clickbait which ruined at least one person's life. Again, please, please read the whole piece buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/how-…
So thank you to @aljwhite, @flashboy & @CraigSilverman. Thanks to @lukelewis, @BuzzFeedBen & @lisatozzi for letting them do the investigation. Thanks to @HeidilBlake for checking our workings, and @nabihasyed for her work on the legal case.
Thank you also to Michael Leidig, whose main defence strategy – apart from the obligatory letter from Carter-Ruck – consisted of self-publishing a book called ‘Buzz Bottom Feeders’. Still available on Amazon, folks amazon.co.uk/Buzz-Bottom-Fe…
And a few quick serious points. If you’re running a news website that’s been using content from CEN or any other Leidig operations – this judgment feels like a pretty good reason to stop.
Also, I’d really like to know why @Domponsford of @pressgazette – which is meant to be the industry bible – not only published a string of Leidig-informed stories but actually helped set up an NGO with him to promote freelance journalism fourthestatealliance.com
Even in today’s report of the utterly crushing legal verdict, Ponsford gives the impression that it rested on the difference between UK law and New York law – rather than the bit, say, about the ‘self-serving and discredited testimony’ pressgazette.co.uk/king-of-bullsh…
Nor does he mention, which he probably should, his joint project with Leidig, which he acknowledged in another @pressgazette piece plugging the thing pressgazette.co.uk/news-agency-bo…
(Oh, and someone probably needs to update Michael’s Wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L…. Just a suggestion.)
I should clarify - I have had very little to do with the legal case. Just been observing from afar. But immense credit to @BuzzFeedBen et al for fighting this thing so strongly.
But I should also mention another positive consequence of this story, which not many people will know about.
This was the first big in-house investigation by the UK News team. It was the fact that we pulled it off that meant that when @aljwhite came to me and said ‘Can I take a few days to look into this dodgy charity called Kids Company?’ I was able to say yes, absolutely.
And then he found that @xtophercook was pursuing the same story, and the rest you probably know.
I didn’t spend that long at BuzzFeed. But some of the projects we worked on, I’m still incredibly proud of.
This from @psmith on catfishing buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/t…
Hiring @PatrickStrud as Fleet Street’s first dedicated LGBT correspondent. And loads of other stuff too.
But that piece from Alan, Tom, Craig, and the work they put into it, will stay with me as an utterly solid piece of investigative journalism.
And it's really, really nice to know the judge agrees.
