Merchants of Doubt: A Call to Action Against Disinformation

Written by Krystal Grow

When you’re responsible for manufacturing some of the most harmful and toxic products on the planet, presentation is everything, and nothing is as appears. Director Robert Kenner, who uncovered the capitalist complex behind the food processing industry in Food Inc., returns with another captivating documentary that exposes disturbing connections between big tobacco, climate change, science, politics and money.

Part of the DOC NYC Short List, a series of films Artistic Director Thom Powers said were “some of the strongest of the festival that we think will be the most talked about of the coming year,” Merchants of Doubt explores the way the public can be manipulated into vehemently denying seemingly obvious scientific data.

Rooted in the unprecedented and unfortunate success of the tobacco industry to sell toxic products to the American public, Kenner dives into a backlog of internal paperwork that essentially documents the frightening and far reaching ways those methods have been used in the PR wars against climate change and global warming.

“Our product is doubt,” is one of big tobacco’s key quotes from the documents cited in the film, and provides an overarching theme that runs through interviews with leading climate scientists, professional skeptics, politicians, agenda-setting journalists and think-tank executives, all completely engulfed in the business of fighting or proliferating disbelief.

“This is a really difficult issue,” Kenner said after the screening at the Bow Tie Theater. “It’s about doubt and deception. If we made a film about climate change, no one would see it, because they don’t want to see it.”

Kenner tackles tough questions in the film, but made it clear to the audience at DOC NYC his subjects knew his position on the issues when he confronted them, though it was largely unavoidable due to the success of Food Inc. But his ability to ask those questions openly leads to some of the most compelling interviews in the film.

“We didn’t try to fool anyone, but we also didn’t say anything that was incorrect,” he said, and ended the evening with a hopeful call to action. “I don’t think there’s any question to the science here. What we need to do is make it morally acceptable for these people to operate, and I think we can turn it around.”

For more about Merchants of Doubt, visit the film page on the DOC NYC website.

Krystal Grow is an arts writer and photo editor based in New York. She has written for TIME LightBox, TIME.com, LIFE.com, the New York Times Lens Blog, the Magnum Foundation, Vocativ.com, and the Stranger Than Fiction blog and is the 2014 DOC NYC Blog Coordinator. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @kgreyscale.