The New York Times’ Readers Want to Re-Write the Paper’s Gloomy Narrative on Population Decline

• Alan Saly
• August 23, 2021
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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An NPG Forum Paper
by Alan Saly
August 2021

The New York Times can make a claim to be the nation’s most influential newspaper. With over 5 million subscribers, it has wide influence not only on the decisions of policymakers, but in setting cultural trends and serving as a weathervane for its readership, which skews younger than other print media. 91% of Times readers are Democrats, vs. 7% who are Republican.

Although the paper’s famous slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” there are some perspectives which are not generally discussed — or are put into a narrative frame that seems at odds with the facts. In his landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, linguist and activist Noam Chomsky defines what he sees as the role of the media in our society, especially referencing, in many places, The New York Times. In a speech about the book, at the University of Wisconsin in March of 1989, he had this to say:

“According to this alternative view, the media do fulfill a societal purpose, but it’s quite a different one…. [it] defends the economic and social and political agenda of particular sectors — privileged groups that dominate the domestic society, those that own the society and therefore ought to govern it — and they do this in all kind of ways. They do it by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by the way they frame issues, by the way they filter information, by the way they tell lies, like about revolutions without borders, by emphasis and tone, all sorts of ways, the most crucial of which is just the bounding of debate. What they do is say, here’s the spectrum of permissible debate, and within that you can have, you know, great controversy, but you can’t go outside it.” Such appears to be the case with the issue of overpopulation, and how to confront it. Facts are presented, but the debate about what those facts imply is bounded and limited by design.

Any regular reader of The Times knows that there are plenty of things to be apprehensive about. The bad news just won’t stop — in economics, foreign policy, and man’s inhumanity to man. A primary concern of The Times is, in fact, the alarming situation of the environment, with species loss and habitat loss exacerbated by climate change. Unsustainable fossil fuel extraction, overfishing, pollution, and the everincreasing inroads by man into pristine nature are thoroughly documented. But a major solution to these problems is hardly ever mentioned.

A June 1, 2021 article, “Study Ties a Third of Heat Deaths to Climate Change,” by John Schwartz, is a good example. It’s a sobering read, summarizing a recent paper by 70 scientists using data from major projects in the fields of epidemiology and climate modeling in 43 countries.

The lead author of the paper, Ana Maria Vicedo- Cabrera, says that “the future looks even more grim” than the present. The author forecasts that a climate-generated apocalypse is coming to “societies like India, where many people already live in crowded conditions and poverty, and where health services are already strained.” The last sentence in the article is, “It’s going to crack at some point.” The reader is left shaken, if not demoralized.

But a major corrective to climate change — finding ways to lower the human footprint with policies that, non-coercively, find ways to encourage population decline — isn’t mentioned as a solution, although “reducing our greenhouse gas emissions” is. The idea that a lower population would lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions is obvious — but this appears to be out of bounds at The Times.

On May 22 of this year, a major front page article appeared, entitled “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications,” by Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun. The subhead goes further: “Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom.”

If the article by John Schwartz on heat deaths and climate change stoked one set of anxieties — global heating leading to mass deaths or health crises — then this article confirms a different worry: fewer people will mean not enough young people working to support the old.

“All over the world,” the authors write, “countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.

“Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.

“Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating.” The article paints a picture of governments desperate to reverse demographic trends which point to a smaller workforce supporting a growing number of the aged. It focuses on a town in Italy where nurseries are “silent and empty.” A small growth in Germany’s fertility rate is praised as a “green shoot” of revitalization. A few paragraphs on the economic difficulties of having children in the modern world conclude the article.

If there is good news, it’s buried deep in the article — almost as an afterthought: “Smaller populations could lead to higher wages, more equal societies, lower carbon emissions and a higher quality of life for the smaller numbers of children who are born.” This, however, was clearly not the thrust of the article.

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