MediaWatch: May 1994

Janet Cooke Award: NBC's Ann Curry Offers Dire Scenario of Overpopulation Without Citing Sources

Desperately Seeking Science

Every spring, the networks turn their attention to environmental issues, and every spring, viewers see another set of warnings that the planet is in crisis. Perhaps the most overdone story is the threat of "overpopulation." Despite decades of failed predictions of planetary doom (like Famine 1975!), reporters continue to present the doomsayers' side with no rebuttal from the optimists. For continuing this one-sided and inaccurate pattern, NBC's Ann Curry earned the May Janet Cooke Award.

Substitute anchor Jon Scott introduced Curry's April 3 NBC Nightly News story: "In Focus tonight, overpopulation and poverty. Beginning tomorrow at a conference sponsored by the United Nations, delegates will begin discussing the need for a world population policy and the consequences if none is developed."

Curry warned: "This baby in Mexico City is one of 1.8 million born each week into a world now severely threatened by rapid population growth...Today's population has already set off an environmental spiral, depleting the world's forests and contributing to overfishing and overgrazing. Soil is being eroded, which in turn is hurting crop production, leading to starvation, and often, political unrest."

But Curry's only "experts" in the story came from the left: Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, Joseph Speidel of Population Action International, and Tim Wirth, the former liberal Senator turned State Department appointee. NBC did not look for another point of view, like that of University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource. MediaWatch asked Curry's producer at NBC, Tom Dawson, why he wasn't contacted. "I'd love to talk to Simon," he said. But did he? "No, I did not call him."

Other network producers have argued that Simon doesn't deserve to be interviewed, claiming the majority of scientists disagree with him. Dawson agreed: "That is generally my feeling. I've run across him in several issues I've dealt with...his views are not shared by very many, if any, serious academics."

Simon told MediaWatch: "My research is the mainstream now. In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences came out with a report nearly reversing its earlier and more alarmist conclusions. It said `The concern about the impact of rapid population growth on resource exhaustion has often been exaggerated.' It found positive and negative consequences. The scientific community has made a dramatic U-turn. But my views are not shared by the press and the community of academics who are not specialists on population economics -- biologists, sociologists, physicians." Simon said Speidel is "a physician. How is he a scientist on population growth?" As for Lester Brown, "one percent of his professional group agrees with Brown. But he gets 99 percent of the press."

Curry didn't cite any actual sources or studies for any of the dramatic claims in her story. When MediaWatch asked why television stories on science often fail to cite any research, Dawson responded: "The whole problem is not as simple as it's presented on television. The problems of soil erosion are different in different parts of the world for different reasons. In some parts, they're having to deal specifically with deforestation. Some parts they don't. It's a matter of trying to take a very complex issue and simplifying it in such a way that it is accurate and comprehensible."

MediaWatch challenged Dawson to prove his report, asking if he could confidently produce data to prove that world starvation is increasing. His response? "Off the top of my head, I can't answer that question. Simon bases his thing on the green revolution," a new crop of agricultural products and technology. Dawson continued: "The green revolution has increased grain production. But the experts are now saying that the green revolution is reaching its limits, and no new technologies have developed to create an increase in production."

Dawson's views came through clearly in Curry's script: "Through- out the world, family size has shrunk significantly, down a third the last forty years. But the change comes too late to prevent an explosion. At the current rate of growth, the population would still soar from 5.7 billion to 22 billion in 55 years. Food production isn't keeping pace, and experts say that means food prices will rise worldwide because of the increasing demand."

NBC didn't cite U.S. Department of Agriculture and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization measures of world food production per capita from 1951 to 1990. For forty years, the measure has steadily increased in every decade with no significant downturn. This doesn't support NBC's claim of decreasing crop production and starvation.

Simon insisted every one of NBC's claims was demonstrably wrong. "I have a wager for NBC. Pick any measure of human material welfare -- from nutrition to the number of cars per capita -- in any country in the world. I will bet the measure will show improvement rather than deterioration. If I win, the money will go to charity."

Curry concluded: "Monday, the UN begins studying the next decade's priorities on population. The main issues are how to develop poor countries and whether increasing the status of women would slow the birthrate. Most countries agree family planning should be a top priority, even though it would cost billions every year...According to the experts, the world finds the will to bring down the population now, or its children pay later."

Curry's only expert here was Speidel, who recommended spending an additional $10 billion on international family planning. Dawson told MediaWatch: "That was the dream figure of someone at the State Department...Tim Wirth. It's what he thought it would take to educate the world on family planning." Dawson added that he would have liked to focus more on China, whose forced abortion policies were called "harsh" in the NBC report, saying they're one of the few countries with the "grass-roots institutions capable of intervening in people's lives" to curtail population growth.

Year after year, the alarmist conclusions of reporters have failed to come true. Reputable scientists opposing gloomy scenarios have been regularly more accurate than the doomsayers. When will network reporting on environmental "crises" consider them worthy of getting their 10 seconds of argument in a news story?

In a 1990 Public Interest article, Simon wrote that despite his reputation for optimism, he was "extremely pessimistic about the short-run likelihood that people in the West will get the chance accurately to assess the issues discussed here, and hence avoid the great losses of life and wealth that faulty assessments of the impact of population growth will ensure...there will be innumerable avoidable tragedies because the good news goes unreported. How sad that is."

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