Letter dated 15 March 2013 from Graham Hancock to TED. The letter and series of supporting documents below it are self explanatory. It will be necessary to take a look at them all and to follow some of the links given in order to arrive at an informed opinion of what has happened here but for all concerned with freedom of speech, and the negative attitude of a powerful lobby of self-styled scientists towards visionary plants, the exercise should prove worthwhile.
Dear TED
I wish to protest officially the damage to my reputation and my good name as a prominent author and public speaker currently being perpetrated by TED on its own website — see here – http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/
I require TED either to substantiate the damaging allegations made there against me by TED or to retract them and publish a full and unconditional public apology.
The substance of my complaint is contained in my letter to Chris Anderson that I posted on the above blog page this morning replying to an earlier letter to me posted by Chris Anderson in the same place on 14 March. I set out for your convenience below my signature the full text of my letter with minor typographical errors corrected and ask you to treat this as an official complaint and investigate it and take immediate action.
Yours sincerely
Graham Hancock (Official letter of complaint follows below)
Letter to Chris Anderson, Curator TED Conferences.
From Graham Hancock 15 March 2013
Chris, your reply is very strange and does no credit to you in your role at the Curator of the TED Conference or to TED as a whole.
Quite simply the issue is this: TED has defamed me by making a number of accusations against me in this public forum on the TED website – accusations that are highly damaging to my reputation as an author and public speaker. I have asked you to substantiate those allegations which surely should be a matter of the highest priority to you if you have a genuine commitment to science and to truth. Yet instead of doing so you dodge my reasonable request for substantiation by telling me you are attending an event in DC, posing a number of irrelevant questions to me, making a reference to Wikipedia, and asking those you see as my “supporters” to “calm down a little.” This is all sleight of hand. All that is required of you here on the public record is simply to substantiate the grave allegations that TED has made against me in the introductory remarks to this page of the TED blog, or, if you cannot substantiate those allegations then retract them and apologize. Your present tactic allows the allegations to remain in the prominent opening statements to this blog page while you “reach out to see” if any of your advisers are “able to go into more depth” in answering my specific questions and while you yourself “sign off” until Monday.
This is not good enough and I demand that TED – …read more
