Merchants of Doubt

Parental Rating: PG-13

Contains: Language    

Jill's Review

Opens March 20, 2015

Runs 96 minutes

This is a documentary about "experts-for-hire" who act like scientific authorities and help to shape the public's perception of things like toxic chemicals, smoking and climate change. It includes interviews with these experts themselves and other interesting footage. It presents a scary look at how any opinion can be bought and presented as scientific fact.

I thought this movie was interesting. It is scary to see how public opinion can be swayed by these pseudo-scientist spokespeople. My main complaint is that it seemed fairly one-sided, especially regarding climate change (which was still often referred to as global warming in this film). The film was not about scientifc fact but about how these "merchants of doubt" obscure the truth about certain issues. I still would have liked to see some of the facts that they were supposedly obscuring about climate change. They were fairly straightforward with the smoking facts and that made a much stronger impression. Anyway, this was a decent documentary but I felt it was a little too slanted. You can probably wait for the DVD unless this just sounds fascinating to you.

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