David V. Mitchell

David V. Mitchell (November 23, 1943 – ) is a retired editor and publisher of an American small-town newspaper, The Point Reyes Light. In 1979, while he and his former wife Cathy Casto Mitchell together published The Light, the paper became one of the few weekly newspapers to ever win a Pulitzer Prize.

Life

Mitchell was born in San Francisco, California, to Herbert Houston Mitchell (1902–1984) and Edith Vokes Mitchell (1906–1975). Herbert Mitchell was vice president and a minority partner in the San Francisco printing company Kennedy-ten Bosch. Mitchell’s mother, whose maiden name was Edith Alfred Vokes, was an immigrant from Canada. Both his parents were Christian scientists, and his mother for several years sold advertising for The Christian Science Monitor.

When Mitchell, an only child, was three, the family moved to Berkeley, where he attended Berkeley High School. He spent his last three semesters in St. Louis, where he graduated in 1961 from Principia Upper School.

In 1965, Mitchell earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University where his father had graduated in 1924. While still an undergraduate, Mitchell married Linda Foor in 1965, but the marriage lasted only a year. In 1967, Mitchell received a master’s degree in Communications from Stanford.^[1]

After teaching a semester at Marvel Academy in Rye, New York, Mitchell left in December 1967 to marry Catherine “Cathy” Casto, whom he had met in graduate school. The couple relocated to Leesburg, Florida, where he taught Speech and Literature at Leesburg. Leesburg in the spring of 1968 was still segregated, and Mitchell joined efforts to register black voters.

From September 1968 to June 1970, Mitchell taught English, world literature, and journalism at Upper Iowa College in Fayette, Iowa. He also was the faculty advisor to the student newspaper, The Collegian, and the black student union, The Brotherhood.

From June to December 1970, Mitchell was the city hall reporter for the daily newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa, The Nonpareil. From 1971 to 1973, Mitchell covered Tuolumne County government for the daily newspaper in Sonora, California, The Union Democrat. From 1973 to 1975, Mitchell edited the weekly Sebastopol Times in Sonoma County, California, and his wife Cathy was the paper’s feature editor.

The Point Reyes Light

The couple bought The Point Reyes Light in August 1975 and together owned it for six years. In 1979, The Light won the Meritorious Public Service gold medal for an exposé of Synanon Incorporated,^[2] a onetime drug-rehabilitation program that changed its name to the Church of Synanon and evolved into a violent cult.^[3] The Light began reporting on Synanon, which was headquartered in the nearby town of Marshall, in early 1978 as violent incidents involving its followers began coming to the newspaper’s attention. At the height of its violence, Synanon members on October 10, 1978, tried to kill Los Angeles attorney Paul Morantz by planting a rattlesnake in his mailbox.^[4] Morantz survived being bitten, and in an October 19, 1978, article, Mitchell revealed that Synanon founder Charles Dederich had been calling for an attack on Morantz,^[5] who three weeks earlier had won a $300,000 judgment against the cult. Dederich and followers Lance Kenton and Joe Musico were arrested and in July 1980 pled no contest to charges of conspiracy to commit murder.^[6]

An unnamed member of the Pulitzer board told Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw, “The job that couple [the Mitchells] did was damn good, but the guts they showed with Synanon just a few miles down the road… That’s what the Pulitzers are all about, that’s what won the award.”^[7]

Working with his wife and University of California at Berkeley sociologist Richard Ofshe (an unpaid consultant for the Synanon investigation), Mitchell subsequently wrote The Light on Synanon: How a Country Weekly Exposed a Corporate Cult^[8] and won the Pulitzer Prize. The book was published in 1980 by Seaview Books, then a wholly owned division of Playboy, and was made into a two-hour movie for CBS, Attack on Fear.^[9][10]

Lawyers for Synanon responded to the exposé by filing six libel suits against the Mitchells. The Mitchells received a pro bono defense from Heller Ehrman White and McAuliffe, which in representing them won a significant victory for the state’s press. In its 1984 decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that reporters could often keep confidential sources secret in libel and other civil cases without forfeiting their defense.^[11]

The cult settled the litigation it had instigated by paying the Mitchells $100,000, and Mitchell published a photo of the check on The Light’s front page.^[12]

Post-Pulitzer Prize

David and Cathy Mitchell divorced in 1981, selling The Light to Rosalie Laird and her short-term partner Ace Ramos.^[13]

David Mitchell spent two years reporting for the then-Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner.^[1] In 1982, The Examiner sent Mitchell to Central America for three months as part of a news team reporting on upheaval in the region. Mitchell was assigned to the insurrections in El Salvador and Guatemala.

In 1983, Mitchell, working as a freelancer for The Examiner, returned to Central America during his vacation with his fiancée Cynthia Clark serving as his translator. In El Salvador, Mitchell and Clark observed cooperation between government phone workers and guerrillas,^[14] and they were caught in a firefight between guerrillas and government forces.^[15]

On December 31, 1983, Mitchell reacquired The Point Reyes Light through a default action against Rosalie Laird. He and Clark were married in June 1984. Mitchell and Clark separated in 1995 and subsequently divorced.^[16]

During Mitchell’s 27 years of publishing The Point Reyes Light, the small paper won 108 state, regional, and national journalism awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In a July 4, 1989, report on the US First Amendment, Germany’s ARD network reported, “America’s small newspapers top the list of things US citizens can take pride in, and among America’s best small papers is The Point Reyes Light.”^[17]

In November 2005, Mitchell sold the weekly to Robert Israel Plotkin of Bolinas, California.^[18][19][20]

Post sale of The Light

After the sale, Mitchell initially worked as a consultant to The Light, but he and Plotkin soon got into litigation with each other over a variety of issues.^[21][22] The dispute began with Plotkin in February 2006 accusing Mitchell of attacking him in front of The Light’s office. Mitchell was not charged with any wrongdoing and on his blog cited statements the witnesses had made to Marin County sheriff’s deputies.^[23] All said that neither man had been violent but had merely shouted at each other. In court filings Mitchell claimed that what was at issue was that Plotkin was trying to break the consulting contract.

In January 2008, the two men announced they had reached an out-of-court settlement to all their litigation. Both said they were happy with the agreement but had agreed to keep details private.^[24][25]

Mitchell, 65, is retired and lives in Point Reyes Station, a rural town of 750 people 40 miles north of San Francisco. He spends much of his time on wildlife photography and on commentaries about the small towns of his area, which he publishes on his blog.

Books

• The Light on Synanon: How a Country Weekly Exposed a Corporate Cult and Won the Pulitzer Prize Seaview Books, 1980. ISBN 0-87223-761-3
• Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism University of Missouri Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8262-1768-0

References

External links

• David Mitchell official blog
• Point Reyes Light newspaper website