Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz exposed thalidomide, tobacco and other hazardous products and corporate abuses of power. We met when I was Legal Counsel for Constitutional Rights at the Government Accountability Project. Through him, I provided a tobacco whistleblower with a legal memo explaining what the companies could do to him. My employer was not happy. It declined to represent the whistleblower. ThenI left GAP for private practice as a whistleblower lawyer after I was fired, partly in apparent retaliation for my legally protected activity as a Gay man. From The Washington Post:
Morton Mintz, Post reporter with a muckraker spirit, dies at 103
A pioneer in consumer affairs journalism, he helped expose the deformity-causing hazards posed by thalidomide, a once-popular drug for morning sickness.
By all accounts, Mr. Mintz was driven by relentless skepticism toward institutions and a sense of outrage that knew few bounds. “Editors who cut his copy were almost as suspect as board chairmen who cut corners,” wrote then-Post columnist Colman McCarthy in 1988 upon Mr. Mintz’s retirement from the newspaper.
In a career spanning more than six decades, Mr. Mintz became one of the first reporters to apply investigative reporting skills to covering consumer affairs. He attended congressional subcommittee hearings few other journalists bothered with, pored over thousands of pages of documents and trial transcripts, and prided himself on a refusal to be charmed or threatened by chief executives and public relations officials.
“In our work, he was the gold standard,” Nader said. “He was first and best, again and again.”
Newspapers and other publications had a long history of uncovering political corruption. But it was exceedingly rare for a news organization to devote staff resources in a consistent way to reveal misconduct by big business — especially the tobacco, automotive and pharmaceutical industries. Doing so courted risk in offending major advertisers.
When corporations were covered by reporters, the story was often about price-fixing and tax issues, Mr. Mintz wrote in his 1967 book “By Prescription Only.” In contrast, his concern was “more about injury and death to the innocent” and ways in which the “excessive trust in certain Corporate Consciences has been rewarded with inadequately and even fraudulently tested drugs, with useless drugs and inferior versions of good drugs, with protraction of illness, and with waste of our money.”
Most famously, Mr. Mintz turned Frances Oldham Kelsey, a pharmacologist hired by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, into a national hero.
His front-page profile of Kelsey in The Post on July 15, 1962, was the first story to document the scientist’s year-long battle to prevent thalidomide from reaching the U.S. market. Kelsey faced intense pressure by the drugmaker William S. Merrell Co. to approve the sedative and tranquilizer, despite warnings of thalidomide’s dangers by doctors and researchers.
“This is the story of how the skepticism and stubbornness of a Government physician prevented what could have been an appalling American tragedy, the birth of hundreds or indeed thousands of armless and legless children,” Mr. Mintz’s profile of Kelsey began.
“She saw her duty in sternly simple terms, and she carried it out, living the while with insinuations that she was a bureaucratic nitpicker, unreasonable — even, she said, stupid,” Mr. Mintz wrote. “What she did was refuse to be hurried. … She regarded its safety as unproved, despite considerable data arguing that it was ultra safe.”
Thalidomide had been on the market in Europe since 1957 and promoted as an antidote for morning sickness in pregnancy. By 1961, several doctors around the world began to suspect a link between a mother’s ingestion of thalidomide and children born with deformities — either missing limbs or developing flipper-like arms. That year, the drug began to be removed from markets worldwide, and Merrell withdrew its application from the FDA.
Eventually, 10,000 children in 46 countries were reported to have been born with deformities caused by thalidomide, according to published accounts.
An estimated 2.5 million tablets of the drug were distributed to more than 1,000 doctors in the United States for experimental use, although the agency never approved it for commercial use, Mr. Mintz reported in 1962. About 40 babies were born in the U.S. with problems caused by the drug, the New York Times wrote in 2010.
By mid-October 1962, President John F. Kennedy had signed a bill into law that substantially strengthened the FDA’s authority over drug developments and drug approval, according to Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard University government professor who has written about the FDA.
Carpenter said that while Mr. Mintz’s stories were not the sole reason for the law, “absent his reporting, it’s very hard to see how this history played out how it did.”
The thalidomide story was not originally on Mr. Mintz’s beat. A tip had come into the newsroom from a congressional staffer. By rights, it should have fallen to The Post’s medical reporter, whom editors felt wouldn’t bring enough “indignation” to the story, Mr. Mintz said later in a video interview with the Washington-based Investigative Reporting Workshop.
An editor waited until the medical reporter went on vacation, and only then assigned it to Mr. Mintz, who received the prestigious George Polk Award for his reporting.
In his initial visit to Kelsey, the doctor told Mr. Mintz of the pressure she was under to get thalidomide to the market. He later described the encounter as a “personal awakening” about the extent of corporate misconduct. “I was naive enough to be shocked,” he told The Post in 1998.
The older of two children, Morton Abner Mintz was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Jan. 26, 1922. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy, serving as a communications officer and then commanding officer on a transport ship that participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Mr. Mintz began his newspaper career in St. Louis, becoming assistant city editor at the Globe-Democrat before joining The Post in 1958.
His wife of 68 years, Anita Franz, died in 2015. In addition to his son, Daniel, survivors include two daughters, Margaret and Roberta Mintz; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Elizabeth Mintz, died in 1979.
Mr. Mintz received a Nieman Foundation fellowship at Harvard University in 1964. Out of that came his first book, “The Therapeutic Nightmare,” a critical look at the FDA, the American Medical Association and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
He returned to The Post and, besides occasional forays on the Supreme Court beat, began a long career covering the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries as well as auto safety.
One of his biggest scoops came in 1966, and it focused on General Motors’ attempts to surveil and slime Nader, the consumer advocate whose 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” claimed that the Chevrolet Corvair had severe design flaws that made it essentially a deathtrap.
The automaker hired private detectives to snoop into Nader’s private life in an attempt to discredit him, Mr. Mintz reported. Nader sued for invasion of privacy, and Mr. Mintz followed the story through Nader’s 1970 out-of-court settlement with GM for $425,000. The money helped Nader bankroll further investigations into corporate malfeasance.
The pervasive influence of corporations figured in Mr. Mintz’s subsequent books, including “America, Inc.: Who Owns and Operates the United States” (1971) and “Power, Inc.: Public and Private Rulers and How to Make Them Accountable” (1976), both written with Jerry S. Cohen, a former chief counsel to the Senate antitrust and monopoly subcommittee.
Mr. Mintz’s earlier book, “The Pill: An Alarming Report” (1969), explored inadequate testing and lax FDA approval of the oral contraceptive in 1960.
His 1985 book “At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield,” which incorporated much of Mr. Mintz’s reporting for The Post, showed how the intrauterine device developed by the A.H. Robins pharmaceutical company in 1971 led to pelvic infections, miscarriages, deaths of mothers, and children with physical defects and brain damage.
Millions of women began using the IUD before at least 18 deaths in the U.S. were blamed on the Dalkon Shield and hundreds of thousands of miscarriages, infections and other problems were reported. Mr. Mintz detailed the company’s ignoring of safety concerns. Robins stopped selling the shield in 1974 but, amid a flood of lawsuits, declared bankruptcy in the late 1980s.
After his Post retirement, Mr. Mintz chaired the Fund for Investigative Journalism grantmaking organization and was a media watchdog for the Nieman Foundation.
As a journalism critic, he aimed his barbs at news outlets that he felt had too many board members from the corporate world and at editors who did not devote enough resources to making sure the FDA was doing its job to keep medicines safe and effective.
“It’s long seemed to me that, in my experience, too many reporters, too much of the time, failed to ask themselves a simple two-word question: ‘What’s important?’” he said in a 2012 interview with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Harrison Smith contributed to this report.
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