Griffith feared Four Corners ‘bucket-job’
“Today will be a film day”, said counsel for the plaintiffs Kieran Smark as he introduced the 18th day of biologist Jeremy Griffith and mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape’s defamation trial against the ABC and Reverend David Millikan.
At the request of the defendants, the Court was shown an audio-visual presentation prepared by the plaintiffs prior to the defamatory Four Corners program going to air in April 1995 that featured Mr Griffith expressing his concerns about the pending broadcast:
“We haven’t seen the program yet, we’ve been told though that it’s a bucket-job, by people working inside the ABC, on a new religious sect, that’s the way we’ve been described…”
“The program is coming to air in a couple of weeks and we fear the worst. It is going to be the insensitive, superficial treatment that we went to great lengths to try to make sure it wouldn’t be. We were deceived by Dr Millikan we feel.”
In the video presentation, Mr Griffith went on to discuss the history of new ideas and the background to the program:
“Galileo, when he said that the world was not the centre of the universe, had to live under house arrest for the rest of his life…”
“Teilhard de Chardin was excommunicated from his Jesuit faith at one stage for daring to try to interpret religious truths and Darwin’s idea of natural selection was nearly stopped because in the famous debate in 1860 at Oxford Bishop Wilberforce stood up and…said Darwin’s views were ‘contrary to the revelations of God in the scriptures’.”
“The story of the journey of human ideas is in fact the story of entrenched resistance, the old paradigm resisting the new.”
“And the Foundation believes that it is now in the grips of the equivalent of a Bishop Wilberforce who finds these ideas untenable, an anathema and now that we’ve found Dr Millikan’s article from a year ago in National Outlook [it] reveals just how deep his animosity towards these understandings are, and how great therefore is his deception”, Mr Griffith was seen saying.
Earlier in the day, the Court heard a 2BL Radio interview with the late Andrew Olle, broadcast the day after Four Corners aired, featuring the University of Auckland’s Emeritus Professor of Zoology John Morton giving an outline of Mr Griffith’s work:
“It’s about man’s biological future as it must relate to religion. It’s got overtones of Teilhard [de Chardin] and goes back as old I suppose as William Blake and Wordsworth. What is it? Its message is that mankind has lost some of his primal innocence on this planet. We’ve become over, perhaps two million years of evolution, an intellectual, technological, acquisitive, mischievous, inspired sometimes species. We’ve lost the old intuitive and emotional oneness with the non-human created world…”
“I believe Jeremy is making a prophetic utterance … I don’t think that we should too often use the word prophet for a fallible human being but make no mistake there is seriousness and there’s a substratum of truth in the book Beyond The Human Condition. I would recommend that listeners read it”, the Court heard Professor Morton saying.
These recordings were among a range of audio and video material played today before Justice David Kirby relating to the defamatory Four Corners program first broadcast on ABC-TV on 24 April 1995.
The case continues in the Supreme Court tomorrow.
