Merchants of Doubt: Selling to suckers
They’re friendly, chatty and always ready with a quick quote or bold statistic.
They’re also bald-faced manipulators, willing to bend or break the truth to advance an agenda, usually one funded by a major corporation.
They’re the stars — and villains — of “Merchants of Doubt,” a documentary exposé by Robert Kenner (“Food, Inc.”) that shows how you need only sow uncertainty about an idea to a gullible populace to keep real social change from happening.
Kenner unmasks the corporate mouthpieces: cheque-cashing scientists and bogus experts who advance the causes of everything from Big Tobacco to alcohol and firearms pedlars to global warming deniers. All with the intent of confusing lawmakers and forestalling legislation that would make the planet better while costing dirty firms billions in profits.
Meet guys like Peter Sparber, who infiltrated a fire marshals’ association to push Big Tobacco’s covert quest for laws requiring flame-retardant furniture. The reason? Tobacco firms didn’t want to have to make a self-extinguishing cigarette to prevent the fires caused by dropped ciggies. Yet studies show flame-retardant chemicals not only don’t work, they can also cause cancer and other diseases.
Then there’s Marc Morano, the publisher of the Climate Depot blog. He presents himself as an “environmental journalist,” yet he specializes in debunking and intimidating “warmists,” the derogatory term he uses for scientists and politicians (Al Gore among them) who believe global warming is a man-made problem requiring serious action.
A former door-to-door salesperson, Morano brags to Kenner how he can demolish people like Bill Nye the Science Guy in face-toface TV debates, because scientists are “very arcane, very hard to understand and very boring.”
Morano, of course, considers himself a star: “I’m not a scientist, although I do play one on TV occasionally … OK, more than occasionally.”
His efforts bear fruit. Mitt Romney, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2012, drinks Morano’s climate skepticism Kool-Aid: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.”
Based on Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 bestseller of the same name, Kenner’s film uses humour to help cushion the depressing facts he effectively marshals.
He frames it as a sort of magic show, using real magician Jamy Ian Swiss to call out the charla- tans.
“The thing that sets magicians apart from con men and other kinds of thieves and liars is that we’re honest liars,” Swiss says.
In other words, you expect a magician to trick you, but not those smiling faces of reassurance on TV and in newspapers.
Journalists are inadvertently complicit with the doubt merchants, because they must seek to provide the proverbial “other side” of an issue, whether it be uncertainty about global warming or whether cigarettes really are bad for you.
Some of the film covers familiar turf, issues amplified elsewhere, such as the relentless ef- forts of tobacco corporations to deny, deny, deny their product’s many dangers while also reaping billions of dollars in profits.
“Merchants of Doubt” also delves into deeper layers of deception, such as Sparber’s successful efforts to deflect fire prevention concerns from the tobacco industry to the furniture industry, resulting in flame-retardant materials that do more harm than good.
The film at times threatens to overwhelm the viewer with details and repetition, and the participants could be better identified.
But few could argue — although Sparber, Morano and their ilk might try — with the central thesis that public credulity and media complicity is all you need to advance even the most odious of ideas or products.
To quote one damning corporate memo seen in the film: “Doubt is our product.”