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Chapter 7
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
Oreskes and Conway argue that democracy is impossible without a free press to inform citizens. Even though the Fairness Doctrine is no longer law, U.S. media still tries to give equal coverage to every “side” of an issue—even when some “sides” are based on ignorance, confusion, or even brazen deception. The internet has made disinformation even worse by “creat[ing] an information hall of mirrors” where lies can easily multiply. As a result, many Americans don’t believe in basic facts, like the dangers of smoking and the reality of climate change. Politics turns into a game of “he said/she said/who knows?”
In their conclusion, Oreskes and Conway summarize the broad political takeaways from their book and outline how researchers, citizens, and policymakers can help build a healthier role for science in public life. They begin by emphasizing how U.S. media’s structure and incentives feed disinformation and help undermine legitimate science. The core issue is that the media applies political standards (like covering all “sides” of an issue equally) to scientific debates (in which, once researchers reach a consensus, only one “side” is legitimate). By characterizing contemporary U.S. media as a “information hall of mirrors,” they show how its organizing principle—repeating the ideas that grab the most discussion—also prevents fact-based discussion. Of course, with the rise of social media, this problem has only grown in the years since Oreskes and Conway published this book in 2010.
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This disinformation is particularly threatening to science, which depends on anchoring our beliefs in evidence. This book has shown how, for over 40 years, a few ideologically-motivated scientists have prevented politicians from acting on solid scientific evidence by spreading doubt. These contrarian scientists’ arguments are difficult to combat because they’re “based on ignoring evidence.” When mainstream scientists reach a consensus, contrarians repeat disproven ideas and insist that the consensus doesn’t exist.
The merchants of doubt manage to overpower the scientific consensus because they take advantage of structural weaknesses in the U.S. media and political systems. Science only works when everyone involved acts in good faith, by respecting data and truth. But when some people cheat the system by inventing, distorting, or ignoring evidence, then truth becomes indistinguishable from lies, and the system falls apart.
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Journalists then report the contrarians’ claims without revealing that they’re being paid by the corporations that stand to lose most from new government regulations. Several of the journalists who Oreskes and Conway interviewed for this book reported that they never even knew about their sources’ industry ties. Moreover, industry executives have frequently met with newspaper publishers to ask for “equal consideration” alongside scientists, and wishful thinking has also certainly led some journalists to minimize threats like smoking and global warming.
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This all helps explain why the media portrayed the research into smoking, acid rain, and the ozone layer as unsettled well into the 1990s, long after scientists reached agreement. In the case of global warming, the media lagged 25 years behind the scientific consensus. Rather than reporting the facts, the media has used “balance” to justify systematically privileging unscientific minority views. Fortunately, some recent examples suggest that this could be changing. For instance, in 2008, The New York Times reported on how military contractors and Pentagon officials were grooming retired generals to defend the Iraq War. (This is a disturbing parallel to how corporations paid the retired physicists Jastrow, Seitz, Nierenberg, and Singer to defend their products.)
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"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
A Scientific Potemkin Village. Oreskes and Conway note that the corporate doubt campaigns succeeded in part because they created a veneer of scientific legitimacy. They established institutes, organized conferences, and published papers, journals, and newsletters. Their work looked like science, but it wasn’t really scientific at all. And this strategy worked: the White House took the George C. Marshall Institute’s reports seriously, even though they were never peer-reviewed and full of serious misrepresentations.
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Similarly, Fred Seitz took the unusual step of leading a petition challenging the evidence on global warming. He carefully emphasized his former connection to the National Academy of Sciences in the document, and he even formatted it so that it appeared to be from the NAS. He reported receiving 15,000 signatures from scientists, but they’re unverifiable. The NAS held a special press conference to denounce Seitz’s petition, but much of the mainstream media still treated it as legitimate, and it’s still circulating today. Finally, the merchants of doubt publish their work in sources like the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which sounds legitimate but is actually published by a right-wing think tank. All in all, their tactics are designed to fool journalists—and they often succeed.
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Free Speech and Free Markets. In 1973, former government regulator and University of California chancellor Emil Mrak gave a speech about the intricacies of the regulatory process to the tobacco company Philip Morris. Shortly thereafter, President Nixon disbanded the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which had made the regulation process for DDT so efficient. Meanwhile, corporations and conservative donors realized that they could undermine science by channeling millions of dollars to fake experts, like Steve Milloy, and think tanks, like the Heartland Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. All these donors, institutes, experts, and corporations had one thing in common: they believed in free market capitalism at all costs.
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Market Fundamentalism and the Cold War Legacy. Anti-communism was absolutely central to 20th-century American politics. The main merchants of doubt (Seitz, Singer, Nierenberg, and Jastrow) built careers around using science to fight communism during the Cold War, and then turned against environmentalism instead. Men like Fred Singer believed that, if the government steps in to limit people’s economic rights (by, for instance, preventing them from releasing toxic pollution into the atmosphere), then it will inevitably take away their civil rights, too.
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In other words, the merchants of doubt believe in “free market fundamentalism”—they think that society will only be free if the economy is left completely unregulated. But this belief is based on blind faith, not science. Even the most extreme free-market economists, like Milton Friedman, have argued that the government must use regulation to control externalities like pollution. And by lying to the public, the merchants of doubt ensured that the best ideas wouldn’t prevail. Oreskes and Conway suggest that, ironically, Seitz, Nierenberg, Jastrow, and Singer believed in the unlimited power of private industry mostly because they never actually experienced its failures firsthand. They spent their whole careers working for universities and the government.
The main problem with free market fundamentalism is that, empirically, it’s false. Free markets often aren’t the best way to allocate resources, and they frequently collapse, like in the Great Depression (which the U.S. only survived due to massive government spending). But thanks to the Cold War, many leading scientists viewed their jobs as defending liberty and progress, no matter the cost to the environment. At the extreme, Dixy Lee Ray and Fred Singer accused environmentalists of trying to create a single, global socialist government.
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In the 1990s, this line of thought persuaded the Republican Party to turn entirely against global climate accords. In fact, far more books challenged climate science in the 1990s than ever before, even though the science was also more certain than ever before. Ironically, the longer that contrarians manage to delay action on climate change by associating it with socialism, the more far-reaching—and potentially authoritarian—that action will have to be to solve the problem.
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Can’t Technology Save Us? Experts of all political leanings agree that new energy technology will be the key to stopping global warming, but they disagree about how fast that technology will spread without government support. Some thinkers, who call themselves Cornucopians, believe that technology will always improve enough to solve humanity’s problems—if free markets allow them to keep innovating.
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Although he had doubts about this approach at first, Fred Singer eventually became an avowed Cornucopian. Today, political scientist Bjørn Lomberg is probably the most prominent Cornucopian. But most of his talking points are unscientific and based on dubious statistics. Lomberg argues that humans should focus on issues like hunger instead of climate change (even though it’s clearly possible to do both), and he freely admits that nature has no value at all in his calculations. Right-wing think tanks ardently defend Lomberg’s work, as Cornucopian thinking strongly supports free market fundamentalism. But it’s also wrong: climate change will likely accelerate, so future technology may not be enough to stop it, and it’s simply not true that innovation relies on the free market.
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Technofideism. “Technofideism” is Oreskes and Conway’s term for “a blind faith in technology that isn’t borne out by the historical evidence.” The most transformative technologies have almost always come from massive government investment. For instance, the U.S. Army invented a way for machines to build identical, interchangeable parts for other machines. This technology is the foundation of all modern industrial manufacturing. U.S. government investment also created the Internet, made airplanes and transistors commercially viable, and electrified the nation, built the national highway system, and invented the atomic bomb.
Why Didn’t Scientists Stand Up? Scientists know that contrarians are lying to do “politics camouflaged as science.” But only a few scientists (like Gene Likens and Sherwood Rowland) have publicly spoken out against these contrarians. One explanation is that contemporary science always depends on joint contributions from dozens of scientists, so individual researchers are usually reluctant to try to speak for the group. When organizations do publish collective statements (like the IPCC’s lengthy reports), almost nobody reads them.
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Another reason scientists avoid speaking publicly is that they generally care more about conducting research than “populariz[ing]” it, and they worry that they will compromise their scientific objectivity if they take any kind of political stance. Worst of all, scientists who speak the truth on politically controversial issues often get personally attacked. This has even happened to Oreskes and Conway, and Ben Santer still receives constant harassment, many years after Seitz, Singer, and Nierenberg first attacked him. Finally, many scientists ignore disinformation because their job is to find the truth, not deal with other people’s lies. But if society is going to solve critical problems like global warming, then someone has to deal with these lies. Oreskes and Conway propose that everyone should do their part.
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