[Guest post by DRJ]
CNS News reports Obama Science Czar John Holdren once advocated America and other nations should force TV and radio stations to promote population control and environmental issues:
“The FCC might be empowered to require that networks donate time for ads to awaken people to the population-resource-environment crisis,” the authors [of Ecoscience, John P. Holdren and Paul and Anne Ehrlich] wrote. “Such spots, sponsored by voluntary organizations like Planned Parenthood, ZPG, and the Sierra Club, have been moderately effective in drawing public attention to the problems. Unfortunately, the advertising budgets available to these groups are puny compared to those of General Motors or Exxon.”
Holdren is President Barack Obama’s top adviser on public policy issues pertaining to science and technology. At the time Ecoscience was published, he was an associate professor of energy and resources at the University of California-Berkeley.
The passage about using the FCC to force broadcasters to air advertisements about “the population-resource-environment crisis” is in a chapter of Ecoscience entitled, “Changing American Institutions.” One of the subheadings in this chapter is “Programming and propaganda.”
The authors argue for state-sponsored propaganda presented as entertainment:
“Much programming ought to be informational, even if presented as entertainment,” wrote Holdren, Ehrlich and Enrlich. “People in the LDCs [less developed countries] need help in increasing agricultural production and improving public health, as well as information on the need for population control and the ways it may be achieved.”
“Programming should be carefully designed by social scientists and communications experts thoroughly familiar with the needs and attitudes of the audiences in each country or locality,” they wrote. “This is particularly important in LDCs, where it will be especially difficult because of the lack of trained people and the radical change in attitude that is required. Control of the communications media obviously should be public, with maximum safeguard against abuses and against the problems of ‘cultural homogenization.’ The problem of controlling ‘Big Brother’ will be ever present in all societies.”
CNS says the White House has not responded to a request for comment.
More on Holdren’s extreme views here and here.
— DRJ