MERCHANTS OF DOUBT – The Review

In order to cover every big story, the big 24 hour cable news networks need to find experts to debate and discuss this bit of information. This is most often presented in the now standard split screen format with opposing takes to the story, now viewable side by side (sometimes the host or anchor will take up a third portion of the screen). Split screens are almost always used when another report or study is released that concerns climate change or global warming. On one side a researcher or scientist (former staple of kids’ programming Bill Nye “the Science Guy” has now become a news staple) explains the findings while a representative from some organization (“Citizens for…”, “The …Foundation, etc.) dismisses it with the popular mantra “not all the studies are in…”. But, just who are these naysayers, and what are these groups they speak for? Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway tried to answer these questions in a 2010 book, which inspired the new documentary from director Robert Kenner (FOOD, INC.) and co-screenwriter Kim Roberts, MERCHANTS OF DOUBT.

Oddly, the film really begins over sixty years ago, with a subject fairly far removed from current controversies: the link between tobacco use and cancer. The big cigarette producers were in a quandary. How could they refute the surgeon general’s report? To paraphrase Don Draper from TV’s “Mad Men”, “If you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.”. Public relation firms were hired (the film makers present all the memos and letters), with “experts” casting doubt (hence the title) on the findings, even equated smoking restrictions as an attack on personal freedoms. Two Chicago newspaper reporters were able to connect the dots from tobacco to laws requiring often toxic non-flammable cushions in furniture and bedding. The most compelling sequence concerns a doctor speaking before different committees (always boasting of praise from the Dali Llama) relating the story of a baby’s death in a crib fire, a story he admits was fabricated. These became lessons learned and adapted by “big energy” when stories of climate change began popping up in the early 1980’s (with footage of presidents Reagan and Bush the first addressing “the greenhouse effect”).

This subject comprises most of the film’s running time and features its best sequences. And interviewees. We’re introduced to, perhaps, the film’s real hero: James Hansen, a scientist ringing the alarm concerning global warming for the last several decades. We see how the fight has taken a toll on him over the years while many others have taken up the cause. Unfortunately he and the other researchers aren’t “camara friendly”, and are shouted down by the slick PR flacks and lobbyists, armed with dissenting opinions. But who are they? Many of these institutes and foundations are headed by the developers of the atomic bomb, actual rocket scientists. Seems that they’re fiercely anti-communists and believe that anything critical of big business is un-American, even calling environmentalists “watermelons” (green on the outside, red on the inside). The most compelling naysayer, and the Moriarty to Hansen’s Holmes, may be Marc Morano, an internet agitator, who sees nothing wrong in making Hansen and his colleagues’ private email addresses public and is “shocked” that they would be bombarded with death threats (he thinks himself “witty”). Thankfully there are conversion stories, such as the head of Skeptics magazine along with former GOP congressman from South Carolina Bob Inglis who broke with his party over climate change (hence former), and who continues to spread the warning to those refusing to listen.

Kenner keeps the film moving along at a brisk pace, employing animation against a file storing warehouse that resembles the final moments of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK with folders displaying some often unbelievable missives and memos. And there’s the clips, the archival footage of Rush, Glen Beck, and the ole’ Fox News gang. The best ones go even further back when Morton Downey, Jr., on his old nightly screamfest, berating anti-smoking researcher Stanton Glantz with “I smoke three packs a day and look a helluva’ lot better than you!”. Glantz certainly looks better than him now (Mort took his last puff in 2001). MERCHANTS OF DOUBT is informative, entertaining, compelling, funny and infuriating. Most importantly, it’s an indictment against those cable channels for being too quick to give these “experts’ airtime (do your research!) And it should be required viewing for history and political students everywhere. You’ll never watch the news quite the same way again.

4 Out of 5

MERCHANTS OF DOUBT opens everywhere and screens exclusively in the St. Louis area at Landmark’s Tivoli Theatre