In a stunning investigative piece, Molly Priesmeyer, writing for the Twin Cities Daily Planet, exposes a possible conflict of interest at the University of Minnesota. The University has canceled the premiere and public television airing of Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story, a documentary on the river and agriculture, pollution, how midwest runoff created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and sustainable solutions. The University claims lack of scientific review as the reason, but Priesmeyer cites Shanai Matteson, the film’s assistant producer and community program specialist at the University’s Bell Museum, as saying “the film was also reviewed by as many as 12 prominent university scientists, including Jon Foley and David Tilman (both from the of U of M’s Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior department); Robert Diaz, a professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and an expert on “dead zone” issues in the Gulf of Mexico; Eugene Turner, a zoologist at Louisiana State University who has done extensive research on wetland pollution and coastal erosion; and Nancy Rabalias, another LSU professor whose research has dealt extensively with pollution issues in the Gulf of Mexico.”
In an update, Priesmeyer tracks down a lead provided by an anonymous source and finds that the University’s vice president of University relations, Karen Himle, is married to John Himle, the co-founder and principal of Himle Horner, the public relations firm that represents big agriculture in the state. As a side note, the Horner in Himle Horner is Tom Horner, current Minnesota Independence Party gubernatorial candidate. The film’s executive producer, Barbara Coffin, who’s also coordinator of public programs at the Bell, was informed of the cancelation by a letter from Karen Himle’s University unit. Coffin told Priesmeyer that the University unit was also responsible for canceling the public television airing. The University presumably owns the rights to the film, so TPT is harmless and without recourse in this issue.
John Himle was executive director of the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, the state’s biggest promoter of industrialized agriculture and corporate farms, from 1978-82. The Agri-Growth Council fights vigorously and notoriously against local-control agriculture in the state.
Brian DeVore, writing for the Minnesota Environmental Partnership’s Looncommons, notes, “McPhee [the film’s director] and the others involved with the film project were very aware of how controversial the dead zone issue is. Just as there is a small, vocal group of global climate change deniers out there, business and political forces within the agribusiness community claim there is no connection between Midwestern farms and dead oysters in the Gulf. This, despite an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence to the contrary.” [Link in original.]
The day after Priesmeyer’s story broke, Tom Meersman, writing for the Star Tribune, plays a really bad game of catch up. Meersman adds precious little to the narrative: He tracks down the film’s funding sources and reports Karen Himle (not her University unit) directly informed the Bell that the film’s opening was canceled and that “she canceled the film’s Oct. 5 broadcast on TPT.” But Meersman oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly, omitted any mention of Karen Himle’s personal and familial conflict of interest.
The University of Minnesota, after a handful of institutionally embarrassing incidents, takes institutional and individual conflict of interest incredibly seriously. Frankly, I’m surprised that University employees haven’t all been sent for mandatory reorientation. For Meersman to leave the conflict of interest allegation against Himle out of the Strib story is simply heinous.
It’s unclear who owns the rights to Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story. The University of Minnesota is claiming it owns the rights when Himle made the call to TPT to cancel the airing. But about US$500,000 from the state lottery and various foundation grants also funded the project according to Meersman: US$349,000 from the Minnesota Environment & Natural Resources Trust Fund; US$130,000 from the McKnight Foundation; and US$25,000 from the Mississippi River Fund. None of these entities were contacted about Karen Himle canceling the film’s premiere and public television airing and are waiting for an explanation from the University.
Later on 17 September, Susan Weller, director of the University’s Bell Museum stated, in a media release, that in addition to a researcher not overseeing “the project’s integrity from inception to completion,” there’s also doubt that the film “meets the specifications of the legislative appropriation to the University….” Dissemble much?
Priesmeyer almost immediately followed up in the Daily Planet, reporting that the responsibility for meeting the conditions of the Minnesota Legislature’s appropriation with regard to the film is held by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), not the University’s Bell Museum.
Priesmeyer cites Michael Banker, LCCMR communications manager, as saying, “I made a request to Karen Himle on September 16th to provide us with documentations of concerns so we can consider them within our own review. I was informed that the documentation did not exist at the time.”
Priesmeyer also gets an unequivocal denial of involvement email from John Himle: “For the record, neither Himle Horner Inc., nor I, nor anyone connected to our firm has had any involvement in this issue whatsoever. None. Zero.” It goes without saying—but I will anyway—that if Himele Horner is doing its job there wouldn’t be any involvement. Priesmeyer notes that no one from the University has responded to questions about Karen Himle’s conflict of interest.
But wait there’s even more shadow boxing and tap dancing by University administrators. And it gets even better.
Even later on 17 September, after Weller’s attempted dissembling, Al Levine, dean of the University’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (of which the Bell Museum is a unit; the University—because of its sheer size—is a very complicated labyrinth), told Minnesota Public Radio’s Stephanie Hemphill that the film’s premiere was canceled because it “vilifies agriculture.” That at least has the smell of truth to it. Levine goes on to tell Hemphill that the “film isn’t inaccurate, but it’s unbalanced. He said it should have included scientists who are trying to figure out how to feed nine billion people by 2050.”
Minnesota Public Radio reporter Alex Friedrich has also been blogging extensively about the University’s conflict of interest issue. Friedrich’s blog, On Campus, is the Minnesota contribution to National Public Radio’s ARGO Network.
From the time Priesmeyer’s original story broke, “University officials have paid the price for trying to get ahead of a story, which alleged undue influence by big agriculture, by releasing information in small pieces from different people, who often were unavailable for questions. It’s harder to find the smoking gun of influence that way, true, but it’s easier to notice that each person telling the real story, is telling a somewhat different real story,” as Bob Collins notes in “The trouble over ‘Troubled Waters.’”
Unfortunately, the wheels come off Collins’s analysis in the last two grafs, when he writes, “This isn’t independent journalism. It’s not a documentary. It’s an infomercial and the debate is over which self-interest owns its soul. That’s what often happens when a combination of private and public money—often with its own intent—is used to contract with an organization that may have “skin in the game,” to produce a piece that will end up being shown on public television under the label of journalism or backed by its journalistic credibility. Any time the word “promote” appears in a mission statement for any editorial project process—it does in this one—it disqualifies itself from that classification.”
It was absolutely fascinating to watch the lucid and cogent comments on Collins’s analysis take shape over the course of yesterday. As a result, Collins added some clarifying comments to his original words. I suspect, but can’t be sure based on the clarifications alone, that Colins’s problem is with the distribution process of the film, not its production process.
All reporting has a point of view—and there’s nothing at all in this or any other world wrong with that. So long as the reporting’s assertions are based in verifiable fact, no harm, no foul, and the report retains indisputable integrity.
Corporate apologists are quick to insist that only governments can censor. If that was ever true, it certainly hasn’t been for as long as I can remember. Censorship is the suppression of communication by anyone in a position of control or authority. There is not state smell test it must pass.
If the University’s adamant claims that no outside influence in canceling the premiere and public television airing of the film are true, then an even more offensive—and disturbing—possibility must be true: The University of Minnesota singularly censored the film. The University may own the rights to the film, but the citizens of Minnesota own at least a 20 percent stake in the land-grant University, and at minimum a right to the information contained in the film, if not the film itself.
Disclosure notice: My potential conflicts of interest are clearly listed in the “Disclosure box” sidebar. To be absolutely clear: I have been employed by the University of Minnesota’s College of Design as senior editor/ecommunications manager since 25 July 2006.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.