David V. Mitchell (born November 23, 1943) is an American retired editor and publisher of a 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.
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 University 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.
he died peacefully in his sleep at home in point reyes october 25th, 2023 a month before his 80th birthday
The Point Reyes Light
Light won the Pulitzer gold medal for Meritorious Public Service. It was only the fourth year since the prizes were created in 1917 that any Pulitzer went to a weekly newspaper.
The prize was for an exposé of Synanon Incorporated, a onetime drug-rehabilitation program that changed its name to the Church of Synanon and evolved into a violent cult.
The Light intensified its 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. 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, 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 pleaded no contest to charges of conspiracy to commit murder.
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.”
Working with his wife, Cathy Mitchell, 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 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.
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.