Country Corner
by Steve Fairchild
Wrong-way Ken
One environmentalist swings wide of the facts
Ken Midkiff is a gadfly. And I like gadflies—at least competent ones. Nothing wrong with a little pugilism in print to speed up the blood.
As most of you live outside of Columbia—Missouri’s intellectual endosperm—you may not know Mr. Midkiff. By way of introduction, Midkiff is a mid-Missouri environmentalist and a regular columnist for the Columbia Tribune.
In April, he wrote a column blasting mid-Missouri’s NBC affiliate, KOMU, for what he called an unbalanced story on a confinement livestock operation. And that brings us back to competence. H.L. Mencken, who could draw blood with words in a most refined way, once put down in an autobiography that “…I simply can’t imagine competence as anything save admirable, for it is very rare in the world...and those who have it in some measure, in any art or craft from adultery to zoology, are the only human beings I can think of who will be worth the oil to fry them in hell.”
When it comes to the fat-content of competence, in his April column, Midkiff proved too lean for the fry. He reported that northeast Missouri farmers Kevin and Chris Chinn grow hogs on contract with Cargill. Then he built an argument purporting that contract farming casts a dark shadow on family farms. What a phone call might have revealed is that the Chinns run a multi-generational family hog farm. They don’t grow for Cargill. They are independent. Once Midkiff had pierced his rapier of rhetorical wit into his own foot, he swashbuckled around in circles for good measure, building his argument on a mistake. The column was titled “Objectivity missing in news report on CAFOs.”
Feel free to pause here to regain your composure.
What is troublesome is that if it hadn’t been for a reasoned response from Chris Chinn, readers of the Tribune wouldn’t have known the difference. To his credit, and after Chinn’s response, Midkiff acknowledged his error. Then he muddled it with a swipe at the KOMU student reporter and more printed speculation about the Chinn’s farming operation.
Normally, I wouldn’t bring this up. I’d tally it as a single strike. Forgive, forget and the rest of it. But a few years back Midkiff stopped his gamboling through the countryside to tilt at a windmill that more directly affected me. He lambasted the Missouri Ruralist and my editor at the time, Larry Harper, as pawns of Big Energy. Of course, he meant to vilify Rural Missouri, a publication that represents Missouri’s rural electric cooperatives—the ones that so maliciously deliver affordable and dependable electricity to you. Same swish swish of the same rapier. Same bleeding foot.
Today I dug through the semipermanent pile in my in box to find a document I keep around as a method for instant cheer. It is a letter from Midkiff introducing himself as a freelance writer and suggesting that he’d be a good contributor for Today’s Farmer. One expertise he listed was agriculture. Even now, I have to wipe the tears just thinking about it.
I will defend the column space in any publication as wellsuited for an opinionated romp. Yet screeds built on misrepresentation will damage the publication in the long run. In fact, they will damage all publications, which is why I take Midkiff to task here.
Mencken probably had it right, but I wouldn’t wish damnation on anyone, even incompetent opinion writers. Hell is for liars, cheats and French soccer hooligans.
No, I hope that repentance can save the mistaken columnist. In fact, my salvation will depend on it. However, there should be a place in purgatory for writers who mislead through lazy inferences, half-truths and twisted retractions that bring neither clarification nor contrition. The editors at the Columbia Tribune should consider bouncing Midkiff’s column from their respectable paper. Failing that, they should at least establish a carpool to save energy on the way to that editorial purgatory—where, in eternal reminder of misspent words, a nasty breeze rattles the refrain from that Bob Dylan standard, “Idiot Wind.”
There is plenty of debate to be brought to agricultural issues from livestock agriculture to biofuels, biotechnology and the economics of rural communities. Too bad so much space (and good fiber pulp) is wasted on getting it so carelessly wrong. Think of the trees, Ken. Think of the trees.
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