Don’t underestimate Robert Kenner’s “Merchants of Doubt.” It may sound like a standard-issue advocacy documentary concerned, as so many are, with the perils of global warming, but it’s a lot more than that.
This enthralling film, based on the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, is as fascinating as it is horrifying. It gives a peek behind the curtain of how public opinion is formed in this country, how spin doctors and media manipulators — often the same folks working across a whole range of issues — get people to ignore science at their own peril.
“Merchants” posits that it all goes back to the tobacco industry and the battle over the hazards of cigarettes to health. As described by anti-tobacco scientist Stanton Glantz, the turning point came when a leak of internal tobacco-industry documents revealed that the cigarette companies knew their product caused cancer as early as the 1950s.
But, acting on the advice of advertising firm Hill & Knowlton, the tobacco firms realized that, to quote one of their own documents, “doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.” As the film notes, every day that action is delayed on one of these issues is another day when money can be made.