Letters | 31 December 2011

Chiller app

Sir: Niall Ferguson (‘On being called a racist’, 17/24 December) says that ‘the freedom of the press does not extend to defamation’. This is an odd idea, but one which Ferguson shares with the governments of those countries in which journalists are routinely imprisoned for insulting the powerful. In England, defamation is a civil offence and claims of libel must be won through reasoned argument, not simply asserted.