ABSTRACT
According to Malthusianism, which is rooted in Thomas Malthus' theoretical postulates in An Essay on the Principle of Population, population growth must be maintained. This chapter suggests that the construction of the discursive regime on population control takes its roots in Malthusian ideas that permit its proponents to shift the responsibility for poverty and resource depletion from structures of wealth production and distribution to victims of these unequal structures. In tracing this discursive regime to the theory on population growth of Thomas Robert Malthus in the 18th century, the chapter explores how journalism, acting in subservient capacity to elite and powerful sources under the rule of objectivity and false journalistic conventions, has mutated his key ideas over the time to serve power discourses of population and development, including racist ones, such as Social Darwinism, eugenics and, more recently, the "Bell Curve" on intelligence differences between different races in different cultures.
