MediaWatch: June 1992
Table of Contents:
Janet Cooke Award: CNN: "People Bomb" Implodes
On most issues, CNN serves as an example of balanced television news. But when it comes to the environment, CNN is a textbook example of advocacy journalism. For its one-sided month-long series of daily special reports on the eve of the Rio Earth Summit titled "The People Bomb," CNN earned the June Janet Cooke Award.
Ted Turner's environmental journalists have repeatedly and publicly rejected objectivity in environmental news, because balance doesn't spur people to action. In the Summer 1990 Gannett Center Journal, TBS Senior Producer Teya Ryan declared: "The 'balanced' report, in some cases, may no longer be the most effective, or even the most informative. Indeed, it can be debilitating. Can we afford to wait for our audience to come to its own conclusions? I think not."
Like its corporate colleagues at TBS, CNN ignored the basics of balanced journalism and demonstrated its contempt for the intellect of its audience. The first (and worst) report in "The People Bomb" series on the May 4 World News used only two on-air sources: discredited Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and Carl Pope of the Sierra Club.
Anchor Susan Rook began the story: "Our month-long series on global overpopulation begins with CNN's Mark Walton's report on responsibility. When it comes to damaging our world, you may be surprised at who's to blame."
Walton continued: "Picture the developing world. Too many people on the edge of survival. Fouling the land, water, air. Compounding a crisis of poverty. It is the very face of overpopulation. But what about this? It's a middle-class suburb outside San Francisco called Pleasant Hill. And it really is a nice place to live: nice houses, nice cars, plenty to eat. The size of an average household is about 2.4 people. Certainly a place like this has nothing to do with overpopulation. Or does it?"
The rest of the piece, salted only with Pope and Ehrlich, theorized that industrialized nations and their conveniences are much more destructive than the Third World. Ehrlich explained: "Generally one can say that the birth of a baby in the United States is on the order of thirty times as big a disaster for things like global climate change, the ozone layer, acid precipitation, and so on, as a baby born in a poor family in Nepal, Bangladesh, Colombia, or whatever."
Even American environmental do-gooders were condemned. Walton faulted the family they spotlighted in California: "The Bakers are conscientious waste recyclers, with special bins for cans, bottles, and newspapers. Still, the very lifestyle that demands such materials traps them in a cycle of environmental destruction."
CNN didn't give viewers the treat of enunciating Ehrlich's real agenda. In his 1970 book Population, Resources, Environment, Ehrlich preached: "It has been concluded that mandatory population control laws, even those requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under our existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently compelling to endanger the society. A few consider the situation already serious enough to justify some forms of compulsion." Ehrlich also urged: "A massive campaign must be launched to restore a quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States."
CNN also failed to tell viewers about Ehrlich's dreadful record of predicting the future. In 1980, Ehrlich bet economist Julian Simon that five natural resources of Ehrlich's choosing would grow more scarce [i.e., expensive] by 1990. Ehrlich lost on all five counts.
When asked by MediaWatch about Simon's absence from the May 4 story, Stacy Jolna, the CNN producer in charge of the series, pointed out that Simon did appear on the morning talk show Crier & Co. on May 4. Simon told MediaWatch a CNN crew interviewed him for two and a half hours, but none of it appeared in the "People Bomb" series. Jolna knew Simon won the bet, but stressed that Simon was outnumbered: "The vast, overwhelming majority of voices in the field of population pretty much speak to the problems and there are very, very faint voices that think we ain't got a problem. We clearly have a problem....That all of this will fix itself at some point in the future is a silly way to operate."
In the April 27 Washington Times, Simon disagreed: "Even the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that our air and water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world's population has been eating ever better since World War II. Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world -- life expectancy has almost tripled in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubled in the poor countries in the past four decades."
Simon noted that the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences [not a "faint voice" among scientists] completely reversed its earlier view that population growth hurts economic development, but "this U-turn by the scientific consensus of experts on the subject has gone unacknowledged by the press."
"The People Bomb" placed little emphasis on actual population trends. As Ben Wattenberg, another expert excluded from the series, explained: "The keystone demographic datum is the 'Total Fertility Rate' (TFR). That represents the number of children a woman will bear in her fertile years." In modern countries, Wattenberg continued, a TFR of 2.1 yields a stable, non-growing population. "In 1960-65, according to UN data, the global TFR was 5.0. In 1990, according to the new Population Reference Bureau's 'Population Data Sheet,' the rate was 3.3 -- a 34 percent decrease in slightly more than one generation." Wattenberg also noted that the "less developed countries" reduced their TFR over the last 25 years a substantial 62 percent of the way down toward their replacement rate of 2.4.
Instead of addressing the statistical record, CNN focused on the role of Third World economies and cultures in population growth, citing, for example, the negative role of the Catholic Church in causing overpopulation. CNN lovingly promoted international birth control distribution. Throughout, CNN presented a grim picture of Earth's future while avoiding the inconvenience of counter- argument.
But CNN's Jolna called the series "a comprehensive, objective look...at global overpopulation." To Jolna, objectivity doesn't require presenting both sides: "If you've got 99 voices saying yes, we've got a problem, and it's a big problem, and you have one voice saying this is not a problem, how much weight do you give to that in terms of objective journalism? I don't think it's objective to take one out of 100 and put him up against one who represents the other 99, and say this is a balanced and fair report. I think you've got to go with the 99 percent, as we do as good journalists, and say this is what the overriding opinions are regarding this issue." In presenting only one side, and dismissing experts like Wattenberg and Simon, CNN isn't serving the public. If dramatic scenarios of gloom require drastic political action, reporters have to trust the people to make logical decisions, even after hearing both sides. Doing anything less says: the public be damned.
