Themes
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.
Themes
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.
Journalists unwittingly do the merchants of doubt’s bidding because doubt-mongers have the right credentials and know how to make their lies seem newsworthy. Meanwhile, journalism is driven by speed and profit, so journalists often fail to fully investigate their sources’ backgrounds and motives. Reforming the system to promote legitimate science would require, first and foremost, ensuring that journalists and politicians hold scientists to the same standards that scientists apply to themselves.
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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.)
Oreskes and Conway present this media bias as the primary reason for the disconnect between science and policy. Their example from The New York Times shows that this trend may be slowly changing, and this book promises to help speed up the process. However, they also make it clear that broader changes in the structure of U.S. journalism will be necessary in order to ensure that media companies actually start putting facts over process. Moreover, the example from The New York Times also suggests that doubt-mongering techniques are spreading to other realms of life and society in the U.S.
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Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
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.
In this next section, Oreskes and Conway focus on the specific techniques that the doubt-mongers used to appeal to politicians and the media. They copied all of the outward structures and practices associated with science, but without actually doing any research. And they rightly assumed that policymakers either wouldn’t be able to tell or wouldn’t care if they were actually doing real peer-reviewed science.
Themes
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.
Seitz’s credentials were legitimate, but he used them in a deceptive way: he manipulated them in order to insinuate that his fringe positions were actually part of the scientific mainstream. The NAS’s press conference on the subject was an extremely unusual but powerful move intended to defend the scientific community’s integrity. Yet the controversy received deeply unbalanced press coverage, which again shows that the merchants of doubt will continue to get their way until journalism and politics’ relationships to science fundamentally change.
Themes
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.
In the second half of their conclusion, Oreskes and Conway explore the political ideology and financial interests that motivate the merchants of doubt. They begin with three stories—none is particularly important in itself, but each represents an important trend that allowed the doubt-mongering industry to take off in the early 1970s. Mrak’s speech represents the growing alliance between researchers and private industry, Nixon dissolving the PSAC represents the government’s push for deregulation, and the rise of fake experts like Steve Milloy exemplifies the sudden flow of money into conservative pseudo-scientific institutions. Oreskes and Conway see these as the three key trends that allowed contrarians to overtake genuine scientists in the realm of policy.
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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.
As historians of science, Oreskes and Conway pay close attention to the social and political trends that made doubt-mongering into such a lucrative profession. World War II and the Cold War brought several crucial groups together: physicists, high-level military and government officials, corporate leaders, and conservative ideologues. The merchants of doubt were born out of this specific alliance. During the Cold War, the government gave pro-military, pro-corporate physicists significant power, while systematically disempowering scientists who didn’t share these attitudes. It should not be surprising that the scientists who emerged from the Cold War with the most power were these same militaristic, pro-market ideologues.
Themes
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.
Free market fundamentalism is not just a specific worldview: it’s also a broad political movement that seeks to transform society in line with that worldview. Like the merchants of doubt themselves, free market fundamentalism has its origins in the Cold War, when much of the public saw free-market capitalism as inextricably linked to American democracy and global power. Yet today, this ideology doesn’t come from free-market economists, but rather from wealthy corporate leaders, who use it as an excuse to demand even more power from elected leaders and the public. So even while fooling others, the merchants of doubt were also themselves being fooled. Unfortunately, free market fundamentalism has spread widely: much of the U.S. public and political class now believe that the nation’s prosperity depends on giving polluting corporations license to do whatever they wish.
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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.
Free market fundamentalism was the ideology that held together the alliance of military, political, corporate, and scientific leaders who spearheaded the U.S.’s effort in the Cold War. Scientists like Lee and Singer, who came to prominence as part of this alliance, naturally carried their worldview with them into the next phase of their lives after the Cold War ended. Yet, without the threat of brutal, authoritarian communism on the horizon, free market fundamentalism was no longer a useful political strategy. Instead, it gave way to serious misconceptions about history and paranoid conspiracy theories about the government—and, eventually, science itself.
Themes
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.
Oreskes and Conway warn their readers against assuming that society will naturally make progress and learn to listen to science on its own. Instead, they emphasize that free market fundamentalism’s reach as an ideology is only growing. Now, it’s central to one of the two mainstream parties’ platforms, and it’s threatening to entirely undermine government action on climate change—the most serious environmental problem that humanity has ever faced. Thus, the authors believe that fighting back against free-market fundamentalism is of the utmost importance. It may even be the key to saving the planet.
Themes
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.
Oreskes and Conway carefully distinguish between two approaches to technology. On the one hand, mainstream scholars view transitioning to renewable energy technology as crucial to stopping climate change. On the other, the Cornucopians think that technology will advance so far in the future that humanity doesn’t need to take any action at all to stop climate change now. But the Cornucopian perspective is ultimately based on faith, not legitimate research. Humanity has made incredible scientific advances before, but this doesn’t mean that technology will solve all of our problems on its own.
Themes
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.
Cornucopianism props up free market fundamentalism because it suggests that the free market, and not collective political action, is the best solution to environmental problems. Like the merchants of doubt, Lomberg tells people what they want to hear and knows how to appear scientific—even though he doesn’t actually do any legitimate science. His arguments are based on logical fallacies, and their true purpose is simply to justify inaction and defend the profits of major polluting corporations. His rise to prominence shows that doubt-mongering is still alive and well today—in fact, it only seems to be getting more sophisticated over time.
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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.
If Cornucopianism is the leading justification for free market fundamentalism today, then in turn, technofideism is the primary justification for Cornucopianism. Thus, to empirically disprove the merchants of doubt, historians like Oreskes and Conway primarily have to disprove technofideism—or show that the free market doesn’t just magically come up with technological solutions to all of the problems it creates. As they explain here, the historical record on this issue is clear: if anything, technofideism is the opposite of the real historical truth.
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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.
So far in their conclusion, Oreskes and Conway have summarized the underlying ideology that motivated the merchants of doubt and the specific political history, corporate interests, and media biases that have allowed their lies to spread. Now, they ask why the merchants of doubt have met so little resistance from the mainstream scientists they have so long undermined. First, Oreskes and Conway point out that single contrarians are often more persuasive and charismatic than the dry consensus reports that science relies on.
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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.
Oreskes and Conway also explain mainstream research’s failure to influence policy by pointing to systematic biases within the scientific community. Mainstream scientists’ job is to do science, so they generally communicate in a way intended for other scientists—and not the media, public, or government. In contrast, the merchants of doubt’s only job is to speak to the media, public, and government, which gives them an unfair advantage. To overcome this doubt-mongering, the scientific community and society at large have to learn to communicate differently. Just like the media and government should take scientists’ standards of evidence into account when reporting on their work, the authors suggest, researchers and their allies must start to take science communication far more seriously. The fate of the planet may depend on it.
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