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Unlike that 2008 film, which took on the machinery of American agribusiness and its trafficking in junk food, “Merchants of Doubt” isn’t about a product that you can buy at the store. Rather, Kenner says, it’s about something less tangible if no less bad for you, should you swallow it. It’s sold in courtrooms and the halls of Congress, he says, on television and, occasionally, in newspapers.

Call it confusion, mislabeled as clarity.

The germ of Kenner’s latest project, a simultaneously entertaining and inciting exposé of professional charlatanism — practiced, most saliently, by those hired to make the case that global warming isn’t real, or at least that there is no scientific consensus on it — sprouted in the director’s head during the making of “Food, Inc.”

“I went to a hearing on whether we should label cloned meat,” Kenner recalls. “There was someone there who stood up and said, ‘I think it would be way too confusing, for the consumer, to give them that kind of information.’ I thought, ‘I’ve never heard something like that before.’ It was the representative of some meat company. I looked up and thought, ‘Who could this be?’ ”

“It takes a lot of . . . talent to do that,” says Kenner, pausing before the word “talent” just long enough to make a reporter think he’s about to say “cojones.”

He isn’t being entirely ironic. Kenner, 65, does admire people such as Marc Morano, a professional climate-change denier and founder of the Climate Depot Web site who is, arguably, the star of Kenner’s film. After a stint in the 1990s reporting for Rush Limbaugh, Morano worked briefly as a flack for Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who famously called global warming a “hoax.”

As Kenner sees it, on any issue, there are typically three groups: true believers; nonbelievers; and the vast, confused middle. It’s not the middle’s fault it’s confused: Kenner blames the Marc Moranos of the world, who are paid to sow not just doubt but fear. (“Fear is a big part of it,” he says.) The media share much of the blame. Kenner singles out newspapers — this one in particular — for his harshest criticism of what he calls their tradition of “false balance”: the insistence on always presenting two sides of an issue, even when there aren’t two.

“A well-documented, pulls-no-punches account of how science works and how political motives can hijack the process by which scientific information is disseminated to the public.”
—Kirkus Reviews