Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on his show more than 20 times and called him ‘one of my favorite guests.’
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at decades of media fawning over “population scientist” Paul Ehrlich, and we cover more media misses.
How the Media Helped Traffic in The Population Bomb Lie
Paul Ehrlich died Monday, nearly 60 years after he published his book The Population Bomb, ushering in a wave of mass hysteria over the imagined consequences of overpopulation that persists to this day.
Ehrlich warned in the 1968 book that overpopulation would lead to “mass starvation” on a “dying planet.”
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he warned in the book’s opening sentence, declaring that humanity had lost. He predicted “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s.
Of course, his predictions fell flat thanks to the green revolution in Asian agriculture that made farming more efficient.
Ehrlich’s alarmist warnings spread like wildfire thanks in part to legacy media outlets and a major boost from NBC’s Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on the show more than 20 times, including one segment ahead of Earth Day where he invited Ehrlich to speak for over an hour on population, birth control, and sterilization to his audience of millions. In 1977, nearly a decade after the book’s publishing, Carson called Ehrlich “one of my favorite guests on this show over the years.”
As the New York Times wrote in Ehrlich’s obituary this week, the book sold three million copies and “transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders.”
Smithsonian Magazine reports that Ehrlich initially had difficulty gaining media attention — but that struggle didn’t last long.
In a New York Times “Books of the Times” column from February 1969, the paper describes the book as follows:
Paul Ehrlich is a biologist who obviously cares deeply for our planet. He is concerned about the spoiling of its air and water, the chemical pollution of its soil, the destruction of man’s environment by man himself, and just why these things have happened. One of the main causes had its genesis about a decade ago, he writes, when “the stork passed the plow” and population began to outstrip food pro- duction. His pithy observations on how too many people have led to too much smog, too little beauty, too little water, too much death and general filth and famine make the impact of overpopulation frightening and clear. The author exhorts us to prac- tice birth control ourselves, write letters to influential people, talk to clubs, organize action groups and proselytize friends and associates. He provides sample talks and letters. All in all, this is a concise and most welcome handbook on what is undoubtedly our planet’s most serious problem—too many people.
And in 1970, the book was again promoted in an article about books about the environment. It was described as “biologically oriented, cryptic, factual and crisis slanted.”
“The no‐crisis critics will deny the thesis of a limited earth already overstressed by man. But the Ehrlichs will prevail because they are essentially right (prevail but not survive if world ecosystems collapse),” it reads.
In fact even in its obituary, decades after Ehrlich’s key theories were roundly debunked, the Times continued with its credulous treatment of Ehrlich’s legacy and his predictions, which the writer calls “premature.”
The obituary refers to Ehrlich as “an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, ‘The Population Bomb,’ was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric.”
And make no mistake, Ehrlich’s message was extreme: He predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death and that “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Citing the potential for these overpopulation-related disasters, he called on couples to limit their families to one or two children.
“Such bold predictions, some of which turned out to be premature or in error, prompted rivals in business and academia to question the validity of his claims,” the Times says.
And he was repeatedly given a platform to stand by his claims over the years, including as recently as 2023, when he appeared on 60 Minutes.
“The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
Humanity is consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. Biologist Paul Erlich says that our current way of life is unsustainable. https://t.co/AwaKLZFGsj pic.twitter.com/MU1jHpuMwI
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 2, 2023
Five years earlier, he told The Guardian that the collapse of civilization was “a near certainty in the next few decades.”
Before that, he told the New York Times that his theories in The Population Bomb had actually been somewhat conservative, adding: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”
Ehrlich, who lived to be 93, apparently had no regrets about having played a part in fueling concerns around population growth that were used to justify human rights abuses around the world.
As Smithsonian Magazine previously reported:
In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) For its part, China adopted a “one-child” policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred.
And yet in 2012, he continued to defend hypothetical mass involuntary sterilization as “a great idea.”
In 1996, he told the New York Times that, “It would be intellectually satisfying to say the real impact is through reasoned discourse,” he said. “But in my view the real impact isn’t in reasoned discourse. Media attention, press coverage and, if necessary, alarmism at least set an agenda. And that way you can have a debate.”
That debate surely caught on in the ’60s and ’70s.
Time magazine, which actually hopped on the population doomsday train nearly a decade before Ehrlich authored his book, in 1977 offered an essay on “How to Defuse the Population Bomb.” Though the essay doesn’t mention Ehrlich by name, the title was clearly influenced by his writings.
“The population threat must be faced—like the nuclear threat—for what it inevitably is: a central determinant of mankind’s future, one requiring far more attention than it is presently receiving.”
In 1981, after the world had survived the ’70s without the mass starvation that Ehrlich foretold, the Times nonetheless continued to treat Ehrlich and his wife as a credible source, offering a favorable review of another book by the couple, “Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species.”
“The Ehrlichs have dared to paint a bleak picture of man’s probable, or at least possible, future,” the review read. “In doing so, they stand in opposition to those people who do not want to hear or read statistics or conclusions that have frightening implications.”
And ten years later, the Associated Press was also still quoting Ehrlich: “Rich people spoiling Earth, ecologist says.”
In 2000, NPR had him on air to discuss yet another one of his books, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect, and told listeners, “You may have first heard of Dr. Ehrlich 30 years ago when his best-selling book The Population Bomb helped shape the debate about the future of the Earth during the environmental movement of the ’70s.”
That debate continued on even into the 2010s, with Time publishing an article in 2016 that said “aspects of [The Population Bomb] certainly resonate today, even if Ehrlich didn’t get the timing right — which means there’s plenty to keep in mind on World Population Day.”
“The population pressures are already leading to political conflict,” Leora Lawton, Executive Director of the Berkeley Population Center, told the mag. “Food security, while it may largely be a problem of distribution, is still a problem. Income inequality isn’t going to help matters. The growth of population in India and sub-Saharan Africa, coupled with climate change, could be that catastrophe he’d predicted.”
In 2018, a column in the Washington Post lamented that Ehrlich’s book “had a major impact but spurred a backlash that made almost any further discussion of population radioactive.”
“Talking about overpopulation is still taboo. That has to change,” the column said.
Ehrlich, who won a MacArthur prize in 1990, still has a glowing biography on the organization’s site, to this day.
“Paul Ehrlich is an evolutionary and population biologist who has been a pioneer in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation,” the bio reads.
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times took an unusual approach to its reporting on the ISIS-inspired suspects who threw improvised explosive devices during dueling protests outside Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home earlier this month. “At 13, He Was Selling Sneakers. At 18, He’s Facing Terror Charges,” the Times writes of the would-be teen terrorist.
In fact, many media outlets failed to convey the serious nature of the crime to their audiences.
As NR’s editors wrote last week:
NBC New York got an early start on what would quickly become an overwhelming trend, telling a curiously noncommittal story over the weekend: “Multiple arrests made after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.” The Daily News’ headline whimpered, “Protestors throw smoking improvised device, clash over Jake Lang pig roast at ‘anti-Islamification’ rally at Gracie Mansion.” The tone-setting New York Times itself wrestled with curiously tortured locutions: “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.”
And it was just one of several recent headline flops from the Times. Newsbusters rounded up several here, including “The Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was a Quiet Restaurant Worker” and “Family Members of Michigan Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike in Lebanon.”
The second story “included insistence from sources that members of the man’s family killed in an Israeli air strike there were not members of Hezbollah.
As confirmation of the man’s Hezbollah links emerged, that denial was quietly excised,” Newsbusters reports.
The Times hired Noah Shachtman as an opinion writer despite his having reportedly worked to cover up a personal friend’s child porn scandal.
While serving as editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone in October 2022, Shachtman edited an article on an FBI raid conducted at the home of ABC News national security producer James Gordon Meek to suggest that Meek was being targeted for political reasons rather than because he was suspected of possessing child porn, according to an NPR investigation.
Media Misses
• MS NOW contributor Anand Giridharadas claimed last week that President Trump is an unserious version of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler because Hitler was “very serious” about his actions and didn’t “sell merch.”
“He’s not up there with the great historical dictators,” Giridharadas said of Trump. “He’s trying to do that. The attempt is very much in progress. But I think it’s also important that we don’t, you know, concede the ground to him in advance. I think he’s like a highly incompetent person trying to do an authoritarian attempt and trying to barnacle the authoritarian attempt with so much personal stealing and whatever, which, by the way, a lot of these authoritarians have the discipline to not do. I don’t know. Someone’s going to call me on, maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think Hitler was selling merch.”
• Former MSNBC host Joy Reid was at it again last week. To no one’s surprise, she offered a side-by-side comparison of life in the U.S. and Iran to argue that American women are not much better off than Iranian women. She said the major difference between the two countries is that American women are oppressed by Christians and Iranian women are oppressed by Muslims.
“Now, I’m not saying that that regime is not bad, but, by the way, our regime is not good,” Reid continued. “Our regime has secret police. They have secret police. Our regime is oppressing women, taking away abortion rights, taking away women’s rights in like 26 states — some states where they’re trying to have the death penalty for having an abortion.”
Joy Reid: America is a Christian form of Iran & women may have be better off there pic.twitter.com/mDAheewOPU
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 16, 2026