Unsophisticated film watchers like to think that movies are apolitical. They complain when politics are brought into the discussion of films yet accept familiar political bias in mainstream journalism, even film reviews. Consider the New York Times giving absolute, unquestioned praise to Jane Campion’s feminist neo-Western The Power of the Dog: “a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths.”

The naïve automatic acceptance of such a politically slanted statement anticipates the rewriting of film history that occurred this week when both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published assessments of American history — through the movies — to coincide with the country’s Semiquincentennial events. Both of these ideological projects sought to reframe how credulous readers think about film history and the United States.

Categorizing “movies that capture America in times of profound change,” the L.A. Times perpetuated the “hope and change” cliché of Obama’s soft revolution. Its selection of “10 essential movies about a turbulent America at its pivot points” ignored Liberty and Justice for All and, instead, relied on pessimistic, predetermined terms of significance: “The Great Depression,” “Postwar optimism,” “Post-Vietnam/Watergate cynicism,” “Capitalism, unchecked,” “Media domination,” “Gentrification and racial tension,” “The rise of the yuppies,” “’80s women in the workplace,” “Digital alienation,” and “Post-9/11 anxiety.”

Chronology counts for less in Hollywood’s hometown paper than announcing “moments of serious national friction and those rare instances when a filmmaker meets the mood with a true vision.” Horse hockey. The idea of a “true vision” camouflages the L.A. Times’ prejudice for historical “friction” and a sick longing for revolution. Their list is a manufactured — rather than true — view of history.

The article reveals its limitations through snark: “If you want tearjerkers about red, white and blue triumph, this is not your list. . . . Meanwhile, our current state of disunity and division will find its own expressions in time.” Sadly, that time is now, when reviewers ignore the legacy of films about unity: Intolerance, A Man’s Castle, Alice Adams, Of Human Hearts, Hail the Conquering Hero, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Sun Shines Bright, It’s Always Fair Weather, Band of Angels, Sounder, The Last Days of Disco, Beloved, George Washington, World Trade Center, Twinless, et al. Instead, we get preposterous think pieces that only inspire more distrust of the media.

Why scorn triumphalism when talking about American movies, an art form that conquered the world?

The L.A. Times chooses to highlight films that downplay patriotism and cause national embarrassment — the effect of jaded Hollywood liberalism starting with The Grapes of Wrath and going through to Network, Do the Right Thing, and The Social Network.

Rigged categories such as “Post-9/11 anxieties” and “The rise of the yuppies” honor hapless styles of cynicism: Team America: World Police, They Live. Special feminist and anti-capitalist groupings permit either dishonest elitism (Working Girl) or fashionable Marxist nihilism (There Will Be Blood).

A distorted view of America continues in the New York Times’ Semiquincentennial report, also overtaken by progressive propaganda. This rewrite of history is distinguished only by the institution’s uncanny tendency to set the contemporary cultural agenda, as in its kudos to the recently released Disclosure Day (too early to pass the test of time), which tallies government secrecy, alien contact, collective catharsis, paranoia, and modern alienation — all topics that repeat the paper’s notorious preference for front-page “analyses” (opinion-as-news) over actual news.

Validating director Steven Spielberg’s missteps as a historically significant, instant classic typifies how these lists disregard the auteur theory that gave American cinema its long-deserved esteem and that helped clarify what was personal and timeless in film art. Not simply revisionism, this rewriting is a film buff’s version of the infamous 1619 Project. This post-Obama perspective ignores genre movies — Westerns, war movies, cop films, even social-reform melodramas that were committed to resolving the nation’s problems. Instead, these two pillars of media cynicism allow naïve reviewers to revere today’s corrupted Hollywood liberalism that’s now turned decadent. It submits American movies to political pseudo-sophistication.