Merchants of Doubt looks at experts who take money from tobacco and oil

“My greatest thrill as a documentarian is meeting people and hearing their stories,” says Robert Kenner, the director of new film Merchants of Doubt.

That’s true even when he’s hearing stories he doesn’t like from people who make him crazy.

In Merchants of Doubt, Kenner (Food, Inc.) sits down with people who are expert in muddying up the truth just enough so that people can choose not to believe it. The film is about how various industries have whipped up debates around such well-researched things as cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, household chemicals and, now, climate change.

Kenner interviews several of these “merchants of doubt,” including lobbyists, political activists and members of think-tanks, some of which are funded by the very industries they’re supposed to be thinking about. He wasn’t out to attack them — “I don’t do ‘gotcha’ interviews,” he says — and, in talking to them, he found something rather surprising. “On some level there was a bit of admiration and awe at how talented they are,” he says. “I appreciate their intelligence in being able to fool us. And I hope people see the movie and recognize that they are being fooled.”

Merchants of Doubt goes all the way back to the days when tobacco companies hired PR agents to chip away at the scientific findings that cigarettes are addictive and deadly. The companies could then claim that the research wasn’t conclusive, that there were questions the data didn’t answer, that the science wasn’t all in, so we’re going to keep selling this thing even if it might eventually kill millions of people.

The bulk of the film focuses on climate change, one of the great scientific “debates” of the modern age — quotes used ironically because debates have two sides and, among scientists, there is no question that climate change is real. The movie makes the case that politicians and the public are still debating climate change because the techniques that the tobacco companies used still work.

“How can people for 50 years create doubt about cigarettes when there is no doubt?” Kenner says. “That same playbook was used, play by play, by multiple industries, and now it’s being used on climate change. It’s amazing how it continues and how it lives.”