Can Light Stay Afloat?

It's obvious that Mitchell is as proud of his newspaper's sense of humor as he is of its investigatory exploits. Take, for example, the story a few years ago about a cow that had to be brought down from a tree. (It had fallen into the tree from an overhanging ledge.) And there's the story of the woman who tried to commit suicide by driving her SUV over a cliff and onto a beach that is a favorite spot for nudists; she was wearing a seat belt and survived. The Light captioned a photo of a police helicopter hovering above naked bystanders, "A Startling Spectacle."

Unquestionably, the paper's most popular feature (for the last 25 years) is Sheriff's Calls, a compendium of what passes for crime in congenitally peaceful West Marin. It's quintessential small-town stuff, lifted almost verbatim from the cops' incident logs. For example: "Deputies rushed to Stinson Beach to investigate a report of parental assault only to find a childless couple practicing their primal therapy class." Or, "A woman told deputies someone called and demanded a ransom. She said it must have been a wrong number since she wasn't missing anybody." Or, "A bartender complained that a man was trying to pick up women by spilling drinks on their feet. When the bartender stopped refilling the man's drinks, the man went next door and got a glass of water. A deputy ordered him off the premises." Among Mitchell's more recent favorites: "A woman said her brother-in-law had attached an automatic milking machine to her breasts. Deputies who interviewed her decided she was hallucinating."

Says Mitchell: "These are things that make life fun."

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Just how the Light won its Pulitzer is the stuff of which movies are made: A struggling, ambitious young couple scrapes together the down payment to buy a floundering country newspaper. They set up shop in an antiquated little newsroom and dedicate themselves to providing insightful local news coverage; and they don't back down after running up against the bad guys, in the form of a violent and litigious cult.

The cult -- Synanon -- once had been a well-regarded drug rehabilitation center founded in Southern California. By the mid-'70s its leader, an eccentric recovering alcoholic named Charles Dederich, had built a commune in Marshall, six miles north of Point Reyes Station, and proclaimed Synanon a religion. Using mind-control methods and an internal police force, he dictated who slept with whom, ordered forced sterilizations, and subjected dissidents, including those who tried to escape, to severe beatings.

Few people knew much about what the group was up to before Dave and Cathy Mitchell came along. Dave had written several benign stories about the commune, but after hearing rumors about odd behavior there his wife urged him to take a serious look. Mitchell wrote a piece reporting that Synanon had 900 members; and that it owned a fleet of 400 vehicles, not counting scores of motorcycles, three large boats, and six airplanes.

Shortly afterward he received a phone call from a UC Berkeley sociologist, Richard Ofshe, who had a weekend home close to the commune and who had cultivated contacts within the group. At Berkeley, Ofshe had even begun to lecture about Synanon as part of a class studying Utopian societies. Having also heard rumors about Dederich's unusual behavior, Ofshe was pleased that anyone in the press wanted to investigate and offered his services to the Mitchells. He and the Mitchells collaborated over the next year to produce more than 100 articles and nearly two dozen editorials that earned the Light what is widely considered journalism's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service.

The Light's role was all the more phenomenal inasmuch as large media outlets wavered when faced with Synanon's wrath. With a battery of lawyers at its disposal, Synanon filed dozens of libel suits. After the San Francisco Examiner settled Synanon's claims against it for $2.6 million, major news organizations wilted into the background. It wasn't until cult leaders were accused of putting a live rattlesnake in the mailbox of a Los Angeles-area attorney representing a Synanon dissident that big news organizations resumed paying attention.

"It's very easy to forget how courageous Dave Mitchell was in what he did," says media critic Ben Bagdikian, a former dean of the journalism school at UC Berkeley and a longtime Mitchell admirer. "There was a lot of intimidation. Synanon sent two black-suited members to stand outside ABC News in New York to stalk certain executives as they left the building -- that sort of thing. And yet you had this tiny newspaper making an impact when big news organizations gave up."