That Christopher Hitchens had to experience water-boarding to report as a journalist that the practice is torture is dumb journalism, exploiting sensationalism over real journalism about a serious subject: The Bush Administration's war crimes. That his readers think he achieved some incredible revelation in reporting this experience makes them dumber. But then, his readers, or rather "fans," want to be entertained with sensational journalism and not substantive, meaningful news about world events.
This is what American journalism has come to: silly palaver as a substitute for serious debate of important issues.
For example, Hitchens had an opportunity in his God Is Not Good to detail the historical, ideological, and organizational evidence of how religious sects have fostered ignorance, spread disease at epidemic levels, instigated if not outright started regional/world wars, provoked and sanctioned the genocide of unbelievers, and in general harmed the general welfare of all human beings. He had a real platform from which to detail the human tragedy of organized religion. Instead, he focuses on his personal problems with religious thought and widely known shortcomings of Judaic-Christian faiths and Biblical scripture, with a couple of sidelong criticism of Hinduism.
His approach and his criticisms are not new, and they are little more quibbling about sensational topics, like Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ and whether science and religion are incompatible, or disputing the interpretation of canonical texts that are naturally flawed as eclectic collections of works by unknown or widely divergent authors. In short, he gets sidetracked from the important issue: That radical religious movements pose a serious threat to world peace and human progress; that, with some exceptions, religious organizations are anti-human and foster hate-mongering and genocide.