The combination of corporate muckraking and media critique solidified the magazine’s sense of its identity—and its readers’, too. Mother Jones frequently printed reader surveys, Hochschild recalls, lists of questions that readers would answer and send back. When asked what kinds of stories they would like to see, “people would always say, ‘I want more stories of activism, of positive news.’ But then when you ask people to actually rate the stories that they read, it would be exposés of corporate malfeasance at the top.”
Corporate malfeasance could not have been more in evidence in the story that truly put Mother Jones on the map. In the wake of the oil crisis, the small-car market had been booming, and the Ford Motor Company had a bestseller in its subcompact, the Pinto. The company’s brash new president, Lee Iacocca, had brass-knuckled it into production, decreeing that it must not cost a penny more than $2,000 or weigh an ounce over 2,000 pounds. Most production lines took 43 months to ramp up; the Pinto started rolling off the line in about half that time.
One design flaw brushed off in the rush to market was the placement of the Pinto’s fuel tank. It was nestled right next to the rear bumper, where four pointy bolts would perforate the tank in even low-speed collisions. Any spark could lead to an explosion—and it did. Between 500 and 900 people, Dowie reported in Mother Jones’ September 1977 cover story, had died in Pinto fires and many more had suffered terrible burns.
Those numbers were shocking, but even more so was an internal memo that Dowie obtained: It showed that Ford had carefully calculated the cost of such tragedies versus the cost of fixing the car. An annual toll of 180 deaths and 180 serious injuries would cost about $50 million. Retooling the assembly line to add an $11 part would come out to $137 million. Ford had chosen the cheaper path.
If the Dalkon Shield story had made a splash, this one was a cannonball. Ralph Nader held a press conference announcing Mother Jones’ findings. The New York Times ran a story. Mike Wallace did a long segment on 60 Minutes. (The MoJo team felt a little salty, Dowie recalls, about CBS ripping off their earlier stories, “so when they called this time, we said, ‘Yes, we’ll help you, but you have to credit us on the air.’”) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation. Eventually, Ford recalled 1.5 million cars—roughly half of all the Pintos it had ever sold—and ended up facing more than 100 lawsuits, including the first-ever criminal prosecution of a company for a product defect. (A jury later found Ford not guilty of reckless homicide.)
“When a little pipsqueak magazine out on the West Coast all of a sudden is getting a lot of national attention,” Dowie recalls, “that’s exhilarating and fun.”
The Pinto story cemented the young magazine’s sense of its “journalism of purpose,” as Parker called it, and left the fretting about carving out this or that position on the left in the rearview mirror.