Morton Mintz, Muckraking Crusader for Consumers, Dies at 103

Morton Mintz, a muckraking journalist who in articles and books exposed the perils of prescription medical products like thalidomide and the Dalkon Shield, and who challenged the auto industry to be more accountable to consumers, died on Monday at his home in Washington. He was 103.

His death was confirmed by his son, Daniel Mintz.

As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post for three decades and an author of 10 books on corporate corruption and government negligence, Mr. Mintz revealed that in the mid-1960s, General Motors had hired detectives to stalk the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, presumably looking to smear him, after Mr. Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a groundbreaking 1965 book that documented the hazards posed by G.M.’s Chevrolet Corvair, a rear-engine compact car.

“More than any other reporter, Mintz broke open the walls surrounding the media’s non-coverage of serious consumer, environmental and worker harms and rights,” Mr. Nader wrote in 2022, when Mr. Mintz celebrated his 100th birthday.

“What made him stay on the story was not just his professionalism and his regard for the readers, but his passion for justice for the underdogs,” Mr. Nader added. “He epitomized the aphorism ‘information is the currency of democracy.’”

Morton Abner Mintz was born on Jan. 26, 1922, in Ann Arbor, Mich., to William and Sarah (Solomon) Mintz, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who owned a dry goods store during the Great Depression.

In 1943, Mr. Mintz graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan, where he had been the editorial director of the student newspaper. Joining the wartime Navy, he participated in the D-Day invasion — he was one of the dwindling number of surviving veterans from that operation in 1944 — and was discharged in 1946.

From 1946 to 1958, Mr. Mintz was a reporter in St. Louis, first for The Star-Times and then for The Globe-Democrat, where he exposed the plight of vulnerable people with intellectual disabilities.

He was hired by The Washington Post in 1958, and for the next 30 years his reporting on consumer issues would help spur reforms by the federal government and Congress.

In 1960, William S. Merrell Company, the American licensee of the German maker of the sedative and tranquilizer thalidomide, applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval to sell the drug in the United States. Mr. Mintz’s articles in 1962 revealed that the mothers of several thousand children in Europe who were born with deformities had taken the drug during the first trimester of pregnancy.

Mr. Mintz’s front-page profile of Dr. Frances O. Kelsey, an F.D.A. medical officer who had refused to approve the drug, prompted critics to disparage her as a “bureaucratic nit-picker,” but the article led to congressional hearings.

The hearings disclosed that the company had already distributed 2.5 million thalidomide pills to doctors and had pressured federal regulators to speed the drug’s approval. The hearings led to stricter legislation that required pharmaceutical companies to prove both the safety and efficacy of their products before marketing them; to get informed consent before clinical trials; and to report adverse drug reactions.

Mr. Mintz said his reporting on thalidomide was a “personal awakening” to corporate overreach.

“The story dealt a lasting blow to the then widely-held notion that science and technology always or nearly always produce benign results,” he wrote.

It also fueled what one colleague called Mr. Mintz’s “bottomless pit of appropriate outrage” against public apathy and corporate malfeasance that began when he was 14 and first subscribed to Consumer Reports.

After Mr. Mintz published his book “The Therapeutic Nightmare” in 1965, The New York Times reported that it had “already kicked up as much of a fuss within the drug industry” as Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published three years earlier, had generated within the chemical industry over its use of the harmful pesticide DDT.

Mr. Mintz went on to reveal, in “The Pill: An Alarming Report” (1969), that the F.D.A. had approved the birth control pill in 1960 on the basis of insufficient scientific evidence. In another book, “At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women and the Dalkon Shield” (1985), he reported that the Dalkon intrauterine birth-control device had left women vulnerable to infection, sterility and even death.

“The human being who would not harm you on an individual, face-to-face basis, who is charitable, civic-minded, loving, and devout, will wound or kill you from behind the corporate veil,” Mr. Mintz wrote.

In his reporting, he also raised red flags about MER/29, a medicine that lowered cholesterol levels but which was linked to cataracts; and Oraflex, an anti-arthritis drug that was withdrawn because of concerns about liver damage.

While acknowledging that no drug is perfectly safe, Mr. Mintz wrote that the public has a right to demand that “the ratio of benefits to riches be calculated intelligently.”

He championed the rights of the public as well in “Power, Inc.: Public and Private Rulers and How to Make Them Accountable” (1976), a book on corporate sway over public policy. Here, Mr. Mintz and a co-author, Jerry S. Cohen, a former congressional staffer, proposed a constitutional amendment empowering any citizen to challenge in federal court conduct that “threatens to cause or is causing substantial harm to the safety or happiness of a consequential number of people.”

And taking on the tobacco industry, Mr. Mintz in 1993 exposed what he believed was a conflict of interest by the American Civil Liberties Union for secretly accepting money from that industry while opposing restrictions on tobacco advertising.

In addition to his reporting, Mr. Mintz was chairman of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit that supports public-interest reporting, from 1990 to 1993, and a founder of the media monitor NiemanWatchdog.com, which was affiliated with Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and gave reporters leads to pursue for stories. For his own reporting, he won the Heywood Broun Award and the George Polk Memorial Award.

In 1946, he married Anita Inez Franz, a freelance writer; she died in 2015. In addition to their son, Daniel, he is survived by two daughters, Margaret Birdsall and Roberta Levine; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1979.