Two sides of Four Corners
Counsel for the plaintiffs, Kieran Smark, today concluded a three day cross-examination of Four Corners’ producer Deborah Masters in biologist Jeremy Griffith and mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape’s defamation trial against the ABC.
The Court was played two extracts of film footage taken on 8 February 1995 during a walk in the Snowy Mountains, more than two months before the defamatory ABC-TV Four Corners broadcast went to air.
In the first extract, guest reporter Reverend David Millikan was shown explaining his religious beliefs to Mr Griffith:
Millikan:
I’m deeply committed, I have been since I was about 15 or 16 I guess, to a relationship with God which has been, I guess, one of the most fulfilling dimensions in my life. It’s given me a sense of purpose and security and a sense of understanding of myself and all that. Now you talk about God, but I see what you’re saying as being a sort of classic statement of the isolated and autonomous individual and there is no place within your system for a transcendent God.
Griffith:
What do you mean by transcendent?
Millikan:
The God that is beyond this world. You see, I mean, Christianity says that God is both in the world and God is separate from the world because the world owes its origin to God. Now what place is there [for a transcendent God] within what you’re saying?
In the second film extract, the philosophical discussion between the reverend and the biologist continued:
Millikan:
… you see, we have two different really sort of perceptions about the nature of God because, see when I talked about God as transcendent, that seems to me to be essential, I mean I don’t know of any other way to relate to God.
Under cross-examination, Ms Masters acknowledged that Reverend Millikan was “a man whose fundamental Christian belief was unquestionable”. She also agreed that by the time of the Snowy Mountains exchange her view was that Reverend Millikan’s belief in a transcendent God was an aspect that he found completely lacking in Mr Griffith’s ideas.
However, when Mr Smark put it to her, Ms Masters strenuously denied she was aware that Reverend Millikan’s permanent Christian beliefs were significantly shaping the course of the Four Corners program by the time it went to air.
Nonetheless, she later conceded that the program was “laced with religious language and imagery”. Ms Masters admitted that while Mr Macartney-Snape was described in the introduction to the program as “the prophet’s first disciple”, she had never heard Mr Macartney-Snape describe himself in those terms.
After Ms Masters was excused, the plaintiffs called expert witness Paul Lom, a Melbourne-based chartered accountant. Mr Lom, who had filed two reports on the economic loss claimed by Mr Macartney-Snape, was cross-examined by counsel for the defendants, John Sheahan SC, for the balance of the afternoon.
The case continues tomorrow when the defendants are expected to call Professor Maciej Henneberg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Adelaide, and chartered accountant Paul Vincent.
