What appeals to Americans more: a brawl or a scientific lecture?

To some extent, that seems to be the core question media makers have been asking themselves when it comes to covering major issues such as climate change and tobacco use, according to documentarian Robert Kenner. To surivive, media needs the audience to take an interest in what they produce—so a debate is more likely to land on a front page than the diligent telling of definitive research.

Related Merchants of Doubt

In his new film, Merchants of Doubt, Kenner reveals that paid corporate pundits have too often bamboozled the country’s media by taking advantage of the fact that as the ranks of journalists have shrunk, corporate public relations firms—often working for oil and energy companies that promote climate change denial, Kenner says—have grown in size and ferocity.

“You’d rather have a good brawl than dull science—which is not as sexy—on the front page of a newspaper. On that level, newspapers and legitimate media let us down. They presented it as a debate, and they presented people who were not representing themselves honestly as one side of a debate, when they were there solely as hired guns to fool us,” Kenner told TakePart in a recent interview. Participant Media, the parent company of TakePart, cofinanced the production of the new film. It will be in limited release Friday, March 6, before opening in theaters nationwide on March 13.

What’s worse is that in those debates, scientists lacked public relations savvy and were too often flatfooted against the slick rhetoric of public relations firms.

Highly paid strategists with well-honed corporate messages found themselves “up against people who were not good spokespeople—who were scientists but who don’t know how to deal with the media—and these PR people were much more talented at it,” Kenner said.

“But the media should have been a little more savvy in saying wait a second, you’re being paid millions of dollars by certain groups to present confusion.”

Kenner’s latest film is based on the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming—a subtitle that offers a pretty good nutshell of the breadth of the problem. As America’s corporate leaders pursued profits at any cost in recent decades, Kenner says the challenge became to find a way to sell things they knew were killing people and destroying the planet.

Simultaneously, the last few decades have seen constant downsizing and weakening of the Fourth Estate in America as media conglomerates struggled to keep up with the changing aesthetic of how people get information. Chiefly, instead of a paid-subscription newspaper landing on the doorstep every morning, the rise of the Internet meant news and infotainment has become readily available on every screen, and the industry has struggled to capitalize. Through downsizing, public relations firms and corporations found themselves in a position to hire and recruit ace journalists who would have been investigating corporate misdeeds instead of finding ways to spin the truth in a way that invites more profit. Simultaneously, the reduced number of journalists left behind in newsrooms clung to the moral principles of reporting, to get both sides, to always attempt to bring balance, but with less time and resource to check for inaccuracy.

The growing power of public relations “played into both a strength and a weakness of the media, which is you want to hear all sides, but when you know the Earth is round, do you have to give equal time to the Earth is flat?”

It’s not the first time Kenner has lifted the veil on a problem many Americans interact with daily but didn’t know the true face of. The filmmaker is known for changing the way millions of Americans think about industrial agriculture with 2009’s Food, Inc.—another Participant film.

While making Food, Inc., Kenner saw how corporate profit drove the decisions and sees similarities between the actions of big food, big tobacco, and any company that stands to see a big payday by creating confusing and misleading Americans about their product.

But scientists can’t be expected to do all the work in helping the American public understand what the truth is. That’s where, somehow, despite every challenge it faces, journalism needs to step in, Kenner said.

“Thank God I don’t have to do the science, but it’s wrong to think it’s their job to represent themselves better. I’m thankful that they’re working 80 hours a week to try to figure out what’s happening to our planet or whether cigarettes cause cancer or the connection between sugar and diabetes,” Kenner said. “I think those are more important things for scientists to be doing than to be entertainers. I don’t know if we need celebrity scientists, but we need good journalism and good science.”