Population Media Center (PMC) is a left-of-center media company that produces serialized dramas in developing countries to encourage population control through family-planning education. PMC has reached more than 13 million individuals in the last five years, with an average of 1.5 million viewers per show. ¹

PMC was founded by William Ryerson, formerly of the Population Institute and Planned Parenthood.

Activities

Population Media Center produces serialized dramas and soap operas on television and radio, in addition to video games and podcasts, primarily in developing countries, including Mexico, Haiti, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Nepal, Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. ²

PMC founder William Ryerson is a proponent and practitioner of the Sabido Method, a technique for inculcating values in an audience through serialized dramas. ^{3 4} PMC dramas are written by local writers in the countries they are produced after they have been trained in the Sabido Method by PMC staff. In an interview, Ryerson said: “Once PMC’s writers are trained, it is their job to develop a plot with three types of characters—positive, negative, and transitional. The former advocate for positive values and negative ones criticize it, but it is the transitional characters, whose attitudes evolve over time towards positive values, who tend to be the most influential.” ⁵

PMC’s messaging is purposefully moderate and gradually introduced in shows: “Parachuting a feminist leader to Sudan would be too radical.… It is better to bring permanent change in baby steps. If we do it too fast, the radio gets switched off and people get angry.” ⁶

As of 2022, PMC had created 40 shows in more than 20 languages in more than 50 countries that have reached 500 million people worldwide. ⁷

American Projects

PMC produces “East Los High,” a six-time Emmy nominated drama on Hulu targeted at young Latino Americans. Development of the show was supported by Planned Parenthood, and East Los High’s website included links to Planned Parenthood that generated thousands of visits. ⁸

PMC produces Crossing the Line, a docu-style podcast on abortion access in the United States. ⁹

Impact

PMC frequently conducts surveys after airing their shows and claims to find that viewers tangibly change their beliefs and actions based on values promoted through the shows. For instance, a survey of viewers of a television show that ran in northern Nigeria (an Islamic region) from 2007 to 2009 found that 1.1 million new individuals adopted family planning strategies. ¹⁰

Population Control

Population Media Center supports limiting global population growth to support environmentalist goals and reduce geopolitical conflict. It claims: ^{11 12}

Whether you’re concerned about energy, endangered species, land conservation, our oceans, dropping water tables, food production, or other environmental emergencies, there’s one thing that can positively impact them all … the number of people.… Population growth is not an intractable problem. It has relatively easy and inexpensive solutions. ¹³

PMC attributes environmental failings to “the overexploitation of the Earth by humanity, also known as ecological overshoot. We can see the symptoms of this overshoot everywhere we look, from climate change, to species extinctions, to ocean acidification, to any number of poorly performing environmental health indicators. It all relates back to collective overexploitation of Earth by humans.” ¹⁴

According to PMC, the world does not have a “sufficient and fair amount” of resources to sustain eight billion inhabitants. This would hold true “even if everyone adopted a relatively low material standard of living like the one currently found in Papua New Guinea, it would still push Earth to its ecological breaking point.” It claims that “the country of Niger has an ecological footprint per capita that is close to what the Earth could theoretically sustain given our current population size.” ¹⁵

PMC claims the fundamental cause of current population growth levels is “inequity,” particularly social inequity between men and women caused by “patriarchy,” and educational inequity between wealthier and poorer countries. ¹⁶

PMC does “not prescribe an ideal number for world population, but we do believe that it is a mathematical certainty that the planet and its resources cannot support continual population growth.” ¹⁷ However, a PMC blog post states: “If the world can accomplish such a demographic transition, and end population growth early in the second half of this century, it will be a powerful contributor to helping the leaders of the future.” ¹⁸

PMC acknowledges that lowering population growth will take decades or generations. To limit the environmental damage during the interim period, PMC recommends “tempering consumption rates in already economically developed countries should be a major environmental priority—but that does not make population growth rates any less salient as an area for long-term intervention.” ¹⁹

PMC admits that “Horrific human rights abuses have been done in the name of ‘population.’” The group claims, “At Population Media Center, we do not try to ‘limit’ or ‘control’ population.” PMC advocates for combatting population growth primarily by supporting women’s rights, women’s education, and medical family planning in developing countries to limit birth rates. Such measures will allegedly give families the incentive and ability to voluntarily reduce births in line with their own financial and personal incentives. ²⁰

PMC claims, “There is ample and incontrovertible historical evidence showing that most women, on average, choose to have two children or less upon attaining reproductive autonomy.” ²¹

Leadership

Population Media Center was founded and is led by William Ryerson. Ryerson is an academic who has worked for decades in reproductive health and media communication, and has chaired of the Population Institute since 2008. He previously worked as director of the Population Institute’s Youth and Student Division, development director of Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, associate director of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and executive vice president of Population Communications International before founding PMC in 1998. ²²

While working at the Population Institute, Ryerson met communications director David Poindexter, who had worked with television producers like Mary Tyler Moore to insert social messaging into American television shows. Poindexter told Ryerson about a telenovela he had seen in Mexico that had led to a significant increase in contraceptive sales and family planning clinic visits for viewers. In 1985, Ryerson and Poindexter visited the producers of the telenovela. In the late 1980s, they worked with a Kenyan radio show producer to put family planning messaging in his show. Soon after, Ryerson produced a show in Tanzania with AIDS prevention messaging. In 1998, Ryerson used his experiences to launch PMC with nine serial radio dramas in Ethiopia. ²³

PMC executive vice president David Walker was previously the global marketing director at Population Services International. ²⁴

Funding

In 2023, the Cinco Foundation doubled all donations to the Population Media Center in honor of its 25^th anniversary. ²⁵

In 2021, PMC received $10,000 from the Lodestar Foundation. ²⁶

In 2020, PMC received $380,000 from the Erik E. and Judith H. Bergstrom Foundation. ²⁷

In 2015, PMC received $300,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2012, PMC received a $350,000 grant. ²⁸

From 2012 to 2014, PMC received five grants totaling $1.475 million from the Ford Foundation. ²⁹

PMC has received funding from the Argosy Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Kendeda Fund, and UNICEF. ^{30 31 32}

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