Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Secrecy is an integral aspect in the lives of these merchants of doubt. Many of these scientists were involved in weapons programs during World War II and the Cold War—indeed, Jastrow, Nierenberg, Seitz, and Singer all worked with classified military technology at some point during their research—and so they were used to their research being labeled as top secret:“During the Manhattan Project, and throughout the Cold War, for security reasons many scientists had to hide the true nature of their work” (214).

These men had to create cover stories for their friends which sometimes had no basis in reality. As such, the authors repeatedly suggest that these men became used to lying about their work, seeing cover-ups as integral to national security. In regard to combatting who they viewed as environmental watermelons—green on the outside, red on the inside—“Seitz, Singer, and Nierenberg continued to act as if the Cold War had not ended” (214). Rather, they continued the pattern of secrecy in their work, especially when editing or altering the nature of various Executive Summaries. They attempted to obfuscate the truth of mainstream science’s belief in acid rain, among other issues, by incorrectly summarizing the report, thereby keeping secret the true conclusions of the report.

This pattern of secrecy also aligned itself with the aims of corporate industries, who wanted their businesses to succeed and desired that offending science be kept secret. To maintain the secrecy of their goals—the perpetuation of their product—they sent secret memos regarding business plans to obfuscate the truth of scientific evidence. To further lend these claims credulity, they secretly funded conservative think tanks which, as aforementioned, created and disseminated reports arguing against government regulation. The secrecy learned in times of war was reinstated by corporations and conservative scientists alike to advance their political goals. 

Much of the information that was disseminated by think tanks and the merchants of doubt would not have been able to have the intended effect without the complicity of the mass media. Although some conservative media outlets blatantly reiterated the narratives given to them by the industries and various White House administrations, most of the media outlets were merely complicit due to their ignorance concerning these scientific issues: “The mass media became complicit, as a wide spectrum of the media…felt obligated to treat these issues as scientific controversies” (214). The media believed that due to the Fairness Doctrine—which required television “dedicate airtime to controversial issues of public concern in a balanced manner” (19)—they were required to provide the contrarians with an equal amount of coverage to the mainstream science, creating the appearance of more dissent than there actually was. Instead of painting the picture of a few outlier scientists who were misrepresenting—or, in some cases doctoring—the scientific evidence, the media represented the issues as a widespread debate.

Often, this was not entirely the media’s fault, as sometimes they were even threatened by these scientists and organizations into creating the appearance of a debate. During the debate on SDI, the SDI lobby replayed the tobacco strategy: “they began urging journalists to ‘balance’ their reports on SDI by giving equal time to the Marshall Institute’s views. When they didn’t, Jastrow threatened them, invoking the Fairness Doctrine” (57). The media failed to differentiate between good and bad science and good and bad scientists, paying more attention to the scientific bona fides of individuals they considered to be authorities than actually listening to the leading experts—and expert organizations—in the field. The merchants of doubt knew how to play the media, as many of them had had extensive dealings with the media in the past. As such, they were familiar faces that leant credibility to these extremist views. To appear unbiased, the media ended up creating bias against mainstream science within the American public.

Much of the narratives concerning the merchants of doubt directly deal with the evident hypocrisy these men abided by. In almost every case, these merchants of doubt accused mainstream academic science of the faults for which they were culpable. Throughout these debates, the conservative scientists accused environmentalists of being overly political and allowing their political goals to cloud the evidence. However, in every case the same could be—and more aptly was—said for the conservative scientists: they were so hell-bent on preventing the slippery slope of socialism that they used any means at their disposal by which to prevent government regulation: “Evidently accepting that their ends justified their means, they embraced the tactics of their enemy, the very things they had hated Soviet Communism for: its lies, its deceit, its denial of the very realities it had created” (238). They appropriated a kind of utilitarianism within their pseudoscience, ultimately becoming the very thing they believed they were fighting against. In fact, they caused science to become more inextricable from politics and vice versa even as they lambasted their scientific colleagues for being biased.