The key to understanding what happened to Zdzislaw Mołodyński lies in three words on the Mail story that appeared on his pictures in the place of the watermark showing they belonged to him and TVN. They read: “Central European News”.



Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News published an investigation showing how this news agency, normally known as CEN, harvests viral news stories from all over the world, often embellishing quotes or fabricating details in the service of making them more alluring or enticing reads, before selling them on to its eager customers in the English-language media, where they appear under its clients’ own bylines. (CEN refused to comment to BuzzFeed News for this story.)

Shortly after seeing the Mail’s story, Mołodyński wrote to the Polish ambassador in London, who complained to Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail. Polish journalists, always keen to take issue with the British tabloid press’s representation of their people as uncouth drunkards, sought to repair the damage to the reputations of the people depicted in the story in a number of pieces. One of these was translated into English by a Polish journalist from Glasgow, Tomasz Oryński, who also provided translation services to the author of this article in Poland – and to Mołodyński when he made a successful complaint to Britain’s Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

As a result of the complaint, the Huffington Post removed its piece (although a video about the story remains live), as did the Mail, which published a brief correction. The Huffington Post told the PCC that it was CEN’s correspondent who had confirmed a “suspicion of drunk driving” with the police – though wherever this confirmation came from, it certainly didn’t come from the local force, as Głazowska-Krzywdzik confirms.

The same correspondent, according to the Huffington Post, claimed that Mołodyński’s original post to TVN contained the rest of the material, including the quotes, but that this had subsequently been deleted. Yet this seems astonishingly unlikely. The original content uploaded by him is still viewable here – and two hours later, TVN published a news post that confirmed Woch was sober. If Mołodyński did indeed make the comments attributed to him, then he uploaded and deleted them with such speed that TVN did not see them, yet CEN somehow did.

Indeed, when BuzzFeed News contacted TVN it was told the station did not receive a request from CEN to use Mołodyński's pictures. A TVN spokesperson also said: "After the story that has been uploaded to [our website] by a user is checked and published as a news item, the user has no means to edit it. We can't say, due to our new computer system, if Mr Mołodyński edited his story in the first two hours after he uploaded it to our system, but no respectable news agency would base their story on user-provided information without checking it first."

For its part, the Mail told the PCC that CEN had said that there was “clearly some suspicion” Woch was drunk because he had been subjected to a blood alcohol test following the accident. It did not say where this “suspicion” had come from, or mention that Woch was in fact breathalysed, or that this was a standard procedure. It also said it had been told by CEN that the quotes attributed to Mołodyński came from the TVN website.

A spokesman for the Mail told BuzzFeed News: "MailOnline received a PCC complaint about a 2013 article which was subsequently resolved to the satisfaction of the complainant." A spokesperson for the Mirror said: "This story was provided to us by a news agency and we had not received any complaint about it. However as soon as the information was brought to our attention we were happy to remove the article and clarify the issue in the corrections and clarifications section of our website."