Today’s Fake News is Tomorrow’s Fake History: How US History Textbooks Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives

The main thrust of this study is to assess how the systematic biases found in mass media journalism affect the writing of history textbooks. There has been little attention paid to how the dissemination of select news information regarding the recent past, particularly from the 1990s through the War on Terror, influences the ways in which US history is taught in schools. This study employs a critical-historical lens with a media ecology framework to compare Project Censored’s annual list of censored and under-reported stories to the leading and most adopted high school and college US history textbooks. The findings reveal that historical narratives largely mirror corporate media reporting, while countervailing investigative journalism is often missing from the textbooks. This study demonstrates the need for critical media literacy inside the pedagogy of history education and teacher training programs in the US.

intelligence community, both of which were advocating for a US invasion of Iraq at the time, to claim that Iraq was procuring what were known as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). 7 Her reporting was seen as vital for advancing public support for the US to invade Iraq, in order stop WMD production.
As David Barstow of the same New York Times pointed out five years later, winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process, that since 2002 the Pentagon military analyst program had been propping up retired generals and active security agents in the corporate press to further their messaging. The goal was to have these individuals, whose affiliations with the military and intelligence community were rarely mentioned if at all, shape the electorate's understanding of foreign policy. In fact, Barstow explained that "some analysts stated that in later interviews that they echoed the Pentagon's talking points, even when they suspected the information was false or inflated." 8

Scholars such American sociologists C. Wright Mills and William
Domhoff, political sociologist Peter Phillips, the late political economist Edward Herman, and linguist Noam Chomsky have long noted the ways in which the elite consensus in government is disseminated to the American public as "objective" journalism. There are other hidden factors overlooked as historical catalysts by establishment reporting as well, including "blowback," a CIA term that describes unintended consequences of covert operations, is rarely mentioned as a possible explanation for events in historical records. Scholar Chalmers Johnson wrote a trilogy on the matter, particularly reflecting on the events of September 11th, 2001, but also more broadly calling out US policy throughout the Cold War where blowback was a significant factor in political developments. That this information is rarely if ever noted in the most adopted major historical textbooks for courses in US colleges is noteworthy. 9 One longtime CIA analyst and whistleblower, Ralph McGehee, went further when he noted the agency's efforts to manipulate information in the press, which would become part of official historical narrative regarding US policy, stating "yesterday's fake news, tomorrow's fake history." 10 Although this persists through the War on Terror, propaganda and fake news production goes beyond an elite cabal of government and industry leaders to include some members of the press, governments around the world, political parties, and satirists, among others. In The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education, Nolan Higdon defines fake news as "false or misleading content presented as news." 11 Fake news can be propaganda, which scholar Nancy Snow defines as "information campaign of lies and deceptions to benefit the sponsoring institution." 12 Furthermore, the production, dissemination, and influence of fake news have been complicated by the advent of the Internet. 13 The Internet allows users to reach global audiences, and its algorithmic analysis of data allows for fake news content to be created and disseminated with effective microtargeting strategies by parties with the ability to reach increasingly broad demographics for their own potential gains. 14 A litany of recent scholarship has demonstrated many media users struggle to delineate fake news from legitimate journalistic content. 15 However, it is not known what impact this has, if any, on the production of historical texts.

History
History is the "branch of knowledge that deals with human past…history may be defined as events of human life." 16 Professionally, historians are entrusted with keeping a record of events and processes that contextualize the present and inform our expectations of the future. Until the 19th century, what was considered history in the US was generally contemporary history. Indeed, those privileged with time and skills to write would draft texts that were considered history. In the 19th century, changes to education allowed for the professionalization of the field. 17 Until the 1960s, contemporary history was viewed as inappropriate for scholars to study because they were too close to the topic and thus considered unable to offer objective analysis. In the 1960s, thanks in large part to Geoffrey Barraclough's seminal book An Introduction to Contemporary History, contemporary history grew into favor. 18 One type of source historians rely upon is journalism, also known as "the news," which was once referred to by Phillip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, as "the first rough draft of history." 19 However, since the 1960s, some historians have remained resistant to the use of current news media in their research. For example, in 1967, historian Arthur Schlesinger not only wrote about his opposition to historians discussing current events, but even in engaging with contemporary texts, arguing that "the growing insistence that official papers should, as a matter of right, be immediately opened to scholars leads to a dilution and distortion of the written record." 20 This ethos has defined the field. In the History Manifesto, Jo Guldi and David Armitage argue that historians are largely unwilling to engage in contemporary discourse and issues, preferring narrow fields of study about the past, because they believe it will compromise the field of history if they engage in current, non-academic publishing. 21 In 2012, Oxford historian Sir Keith Thomas warned that a "parasitic" relationship was being created between young historians who engaged with commercially viable contemporary issues and the field of history. 22 For historians who utilize journalistic outlets among their sources, the media ecosystem has only become more complex since the 1960s. This has become possible through the advent of 24-hour news networks, the Internet, and eventually, social media, along with other new platforms for news dissemination such as podcasting. 23 Few schools in the US provide news literacy curriculum for students, and there is no indication history programs train scholars to adapt their research methods to the rapidly changing media landscape. 24 Note that determining the veracity of news and information goes beyond making lists of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources. Even trusted news outlets with a long history of accurate reporting can fabricate evidence or rely on problematic sources. 25 For example, the New York Times, the often referred to "paper of record," published Judith Miller's bogus pieces on alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as well as Jayson Blair's numerous fabricated stories. 26 Furthermore, traditional methods of verifying sources through multiple outlets is also problematic, given the ways in which the Internet allows false information to not only be reproduced and packaged quickly, but sent repetitiously to users who conflate familiarity with veracity. 27 Given the pervasive influence of fake news and concerns around it, it is crucial to consider whether today's fake news could become tomorrow's fake history.

Methodology
This study employs a critical-historical lens of the 21st century news media ecosystem to compare the similarities and differences regarding US news coverage and college history textbooks key issues from the 1990s and the War on Terror. Like any other message, the news is given power and meaning through the communicative process. 28 Media ecology theory argues that we can understand that process through an examination of the relationship between technology, communication, media and its impact on the human environment. 29 Media ecology scholars value "networks of relations (ecosystems) rather than individual essences and processes rather than entities." 30 This study examines the network of relations and processes by which news is produced, disseminated, and legitimized to see if that process influences the production of history. Media ecology scholars argue that the complex and changing relationships and processes that comprise a media ecosystem are best understood through an historical lens of the media environment. 31 As a result, this study analyzed the technological, communication, media, and human influences associated with censorship, fake news, and propaganda from a critical-historical lens.
Our analysis follows the tradition of media ecology scholars who integrated the critical framework of the Frankfurt and Birmingham School into their analysis. 32 Critical communication theory posits that dominant ideologies result from power inequities that are strengthened and fortified through media and communication. 33 They contend that liberation from dominant ideologies is possible through a critical examination of media and power. 34 As a result, this study critically analyzes the power dynamics associated with the production, purpose, and themes of news in the hopes that critical media literacy scholars can synthesize them into pedagogy of resistance and liberation from corporate and establishment dominant narrative histories.
The data for this study derives from two sources: Project Censored's annual under-reported news story lists and the most widely adopted US history college textbooks. Project Censored's critical, theoretical and analytical framework for understanding modern media censorship, dating back to 1976, posits that the funding models behind news organizations influence the type of content they produce based on the Propaganda Model of News put forth by Herman and Chomsky in 1988. Herman and Chomsky conclude that corporate news media producers' ideology and profit shape their editorial decisions. Given the sheer influence of these media corporations, six of which now control 90 percent of the news media in the US, Project Censored finds that the news content these outlets ignore, under-represent, or misrepresent is a form of censorship. Each year Project Censored researchers identify and vet critical news stories that have not been covered by the corporate media. The top 25 censored news stories are selected by faculty, students, and panel of expert judges to be featured in the annual issue. 35 The authors do not assume that every article in the alternative press is accurate, but the one's published by Project Censored have undergone a review by faculty and area experts as well as research students and finally by their team of expert judges, which is a testament to their veracity. Since the War on Terror began, over 400 news articles have been vetted and republished by Project Censored around key issues in US society, many of which were about foreign policy, and they were all analyzed for this study.
Our study sought to examine if historians adopt or research beyond the corporate press narratives about the War on Terror. We compared the scholarship found in the most widely adopted US history textbooks with , where the sociologist reviewed the most widely adopted history textbooks in US colleges to identify historical inaccuracies. 36 We determined these texts by consulting the American Textbook Council's "Widely Adopted History Textbooks," which has been tracking sales since 1986. 37  As we surveyed these textbooks and compared them to the lists in Project Censored's top censored stories, we performed two rounds of coding.
We chose to look at news stories regarding foreign policy and terrorism since the 1990s. The first round of coding looked for the stories from the independent press that were absent in establishment media and the textbooks as well the corporate news narratives that appeared in historical textbooks. The second round of coding put the various stories into thematic categories.

Findings
In nearly all of the cases, with Out of Many often as an exception, the history textbook narratives matched that of the corporate press. Our

Oil and Imperialism
From threats of colonialism, US invasion, potential economic crises, and the billions of dollars spent on US occupation in the Middle East, conflict over oil is both complicated and central to American foreign policy. This is made clear by independent press outlets, but not in the corporate press. Perhaps, consequently, the history textbooks we reviewed mostly downplay the role that oil interests play in shaping America's foreign policy. When the influence of oil on foreign policy is discussed, it is treated as a political interpretation rather than a documented fact.
Especially relevant during George W. Bush's tenure as president, issues surrounding oil were overlooked with reports of potential terrorism from the same region. Although President Bush claimed his top foreign policy priority was to prevent terrorism and curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction outside of the United States, it has been revealed that the president's first concern was really to "increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to US markets," due to a severe oil and natural gas shortage throughout the United States. 38 Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney came from the oil industry, a fact that was typically ignored by the corporate media. Instead, the corporate press fixated on concerns over terrorism which concealed the growing conflict surrounding oil and other foreign natural resources.
The history textbooks either dismissed the topic of fossil fuels or discussed them in a way that was unrelated to foreign policy. One exception was Unfinished Nation, which discusses the topic of oil and foreign policy.
However, rather than investigate the role that oil plays in American foreign policy, it introduces it as a matter competing interpretations between the politically right and left. The text summarizes the position that oil interests drive foreign policy is a left critique, not necessarily a position supported by facts. However, oil's central role in American foreign policy is well documented. Where the influence of oil in fostering war is ignored history texts, so too is the impact war has on non-Americans.

Foreign Lives Do Not Matter
Although the impact of war on American lives is readily covered in socalled mainstream media, the human rights abuses and murder of non-US citizens received little if any corporate coverage. This is also the case in the most widely adopted textbooks when it comes to torture and death. In fact, the soft coverage is not only limited to the US, but its NATO allies as well.
The corporate press has largely ignored the human rights abuses suffered by non-Americans during the War on Terror. Even when the most widely known establishment press outlets do report on human rights abuses, The majority of textbooks analyzed in this study ignore the issue of torture, except to note the highly publicized cases at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay. However, most of the texts ignore the number of victims; the process of kidnapping known as

The Commander in Chief is Not Responsible
A historic amount of corporate media coverage has been paid to the events, victims, and devastation that took place on September 11, 2001.
However, interestingly, Project Censored revealed that in the War on Terror, the corporate press tended to cover perceived presidential successes favorably, while dismissing or ignoring failure. For example, the CIA issued multiple warnings to President Bush regarding a potential terrorist attack prior to September 11, 2001. Beginning in spring of 2001, "the CIA 'repeatedly and urgently' warned the White House that an attack was imminent." 44 However, the White House responded to the warning with "we're not quite ready to consider this. We don't want to start the clock ticking." 45 This nonchalant response by government leaders was ignored by corporate media, drowned out with repetitive stories depicting the devastation that was enabled by the choice by the country's highest leaders to remain ignorant.
Just like the corporate press, the historical texts did not introduce the myriad pre-warnings. Again, the one exception is Out of Many, which does mention numerous pre-warnings in the context of the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, Unfinished Nation not only ignores the documented pre-warnings regarding the 9/11 attacks, but the role of the CIA in the post-Cold War. The only mention they receive is in regard to the revelations by Snowden. It is also interesting that a text such as American Pageant will not use space in its text to document Bush's failed response to the multiple warnings. Once again, the textbook narratives largely mirrored the coverage of the corporate press in that they had almost no discussion of these topics.
However, one exception is immigration which Out of Many covered. America: Past and Present also covered immigration as an issue for Obama. However, in all cases, the texts remains devoid of any discussion about the human rights abuses at the border or the larger context of how the US foreign policy of presidents in both the recent and distance past have shaped immigration. Our research also found that the dominant history textbook narratives seem to share an ideology with the corporate press, one that utilizes an Our research indicates the need for additional research about news literacy pedagogy in history programs. This brief study is a reminder that such work is ongoing and must be built upon those who came before us, who provided theoretical structure and empirical evidence as a foundation. It indicates that we need critical media literacy to ground historical research methodology in the present. This will be necessary as we further contend with the ongoing challenges of how today's fake news may become tomorrow's fake history, and how yesterday's fake history may misinform today's breaking news.