ARTS & FARCES internet

WikiLeaks dropped its latest information bomb earlier this week and almost immediately its website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. WikiLeaks responded by moving its content to Amazon’s servers. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is known for being relatively inexpensive, highly scalable, and particularly robust.

Within 24 hours of being contacted by US Senator Joe Lieberman‘s (I-Connecticut) office, Amazon pulled the plug on WikiLeaks’ content, making the content unavailable to American citizens. Lieberman is chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Amazon’s business could be severely impacted by any number of even small “adjustments” by the US government. You can do the math.

But what’s especially alarming is that apparently no one from Lieberman’s office even made an actual takedown request, only asked questions. “Staffers then, according to the spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, called Amazon to ask about it, and left questions with a press secretary including, “Are there plans to take the site down?” according to Rachel Slajda writing for Talking Points Memo.

WikiLeaks promptly responded to the takedown on Twitter: “If Amazon was so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.” Purists will argue this is not a First Amendment issue because only a government can censor expression, and Amazon is a corporation. But a more enlightened view of censorship finds that the suppression of expression by any controlling body—governmental or not; organizational or individual—is a violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. But enlightenment always precedes legal precedent.

University of Minnesota administration officials have regularly, vehemently, and repeatedly denied that corporate farming interests—Big Agriculture—had not previewed Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story, a documentary on the Mississippi River and sustainable solutions to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico created by midwest agriculture runoff. No way, the University declared, no how did Big Ag—or any other outside interest—have anything to do with the University’s actions surrounding the film. No pressure applied, nothing to see here, move along.

As it turns out, the film was indeed previewed by Kristin Weeks Duncanson, vice-chair of the board of directors of the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council. That’s Big Ag to you and me. Jessica Van Berkel and Taryn Wobbema, writing for the Minnesota Daily, report that “Al Levine, dean of the College of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Sciences, sent Duncanson an unedited copy of the film and asked her to review it.” Duncanson is a former president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, the trade group that temporarily suspended US$1.5 million in grants to the University in 2008, on the heels of the University’s publication of a report examining the environmental impact of soybean farming. In her email to Levine after previewing the film, Duncanson notes, perhaps ominously, “... The comments regarding the Farm Bill could be very dangerous for the University.”

Karen Himle, the University’s vice president of university relations—the University administrator who initially censored the film—is married to John Himle, the co-founder and principal of Himle Horner, the public relations firm that represents Big Ag in Minnesota. John Himle was executive director of the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council from 1978-82.

Before the internet and the age of the continuous news cycle, putting out bad news late on a Friday afternoon was a fairly effective organizational news management strategy. That’s no longer the case, but the University of Minnesota hasn’t gotten the memo. In an effort to bypass the continuous news cycle, Karen Himle, the University’s vice president for university relations, issued a half-assed apology for censoring Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story, without informing the documentary’s producers or funding agencies. But apparently after considering academic freedom repercussions “I am sorry for this mistake, and I accept responsibility for my decisions and actions in this matter,” writes Himle in the University’s statement from President Robert Bruininks with regard to the matter.

The apology is half-assed because Himle apologizes only for “... not immediately initiating a process that more broadly engaged academic leadership and other university experts to fully evaluate the options and to then make a shared decision as to the best course of action…” And we don’t know the entirety her decisions and actions are with regard to this episode of the University’s censorship, conflict of interest, and stifling academic freedom.

Bruininks expresses similar regret about not convening a group to reach a consensus about any necessary action with regard to the film and maintains that academic freedom is paramount in the lede of his statement: “One of the hallmarks of my 40-plus years at the university is a steadfast commitment to academic freedom. This value is the cornerstone of all great American universities. I have defended academic freedom at many levels throughout my career.”

Bruininks’s statement comes, not unsurprisingly nor coincidentally, with the University’s release of internal email in response to media requests under the Minnesota Data Practices Act.

The Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota student newspaper, was slow on the uptake of the controversy surrounding the University of Minnesota’s censorship 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. Karen Himle, the University’s vice president for university relations, canceled the premiere of the film and its airing on Twin Cities Public Television (TPT). Himle is married to John Himle, president of Himle Horner, a public relations firm that represents the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, and owns a corn and soybean farm in Nebraska.

In a 20 September 2010 story, Jessica Van Berkel and Taryn Wobbema got Himle to go on the record, something no other journalist in town has managed to accomplish. Van Berkel and Wobbema report Himele as saying “her concern began when she saw a commercial sign for Organic Valley’s dairy farm.” So, Himle’s concerns are clearly of an editorial nature, not scientific validity as University spokesperson Dan Wolter originally claimed.

Organic Valley is a farmer-owned co-op based in Wisconsin. With more than 1,600 farmer-owners, it’s hard to throw a rock in Wisconsin farm country without hitting an Organic Valley sign. “Typically, in an institutional documentary you wouldn’t see a commercial interest,” Himle told Van Berkel and Wobbema. The Daily reporters also cite Greg Cuomo and Abel Ponce de Leon, both College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) associate deans as saying the film was “lopsided” (Ponce de Leon) and “‘dramatized’ the relationship between farming and river pollution and ‘vilified’ agriculture without a strong understanding of how it works” (Cuomo). CFANS Dean Al Levine told Minnesota Public Radio on 17 September that the film “vilifies agriculture.” So, at least the CFANS deans are reading from the same script.

Van Berkel and Wobbema quote Levine as denying any outside influence in canceling the release of the film: “No one to my knowledge heard from anyone in big ag about this at all.”

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.]