Hitchens Feared Libel Charges More When Writing in England

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This weekend, the late Christopher Hitchens cured my writer's block. For various reasons I won't explain in this post, I've been binging on Hitchens print and video media lately. In his essay on becoming an American citizen, Hitchens includes this passage:
"As soon as I got my green card, immigration officers started saying 'welcome home' when I passed through. Moreover, as one who is incompetent to do anything save writing and speaking, I stood under the great roof of the First Amendment and did not have to think (as I once had to think) of the libel laws and the other grand and petty restraints that oppress my craft in the country of my birth."
I'd been suddenly concerned about libel laws after viewing Carol Cadwalladr's riveting TED talk on her blockbuster report for The Guardian on information that already was common knowledge or available, that of Cambridge Analytica downloading, even selling user data after Facebook had promised to stop allowing this. Beginning at 9:37:
A dramatic turn in her presentation comes at the mark where Facebook had threatened to sue her employer if they proceeded to publish their story. After a pause, Cadwalladr clicked to the next powerpoint slide with the cover story that had published the year prior. When the image was just setting in, she told the audience "we did it anyway."
"It took an entire year's work to get Christopher [Wylie] on the record. And I had to turn myself from a feature writer into an investigative reporter to do it. And he was extraordinarily brave, because the company [Cambridge Analytica] was owned by Robert Mercer. The billionaire who bankrolled Trump. And he threatened to sue us multiple times to stop us from publishing. But we finally got there and we were one day ahead of publication. We got another legal threat. Not from Cambridge Analytica this time, but from Facebook. It told us if we published they would sue us. ... We did it anyway."






This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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