Historian says Lincoln TV movie based on dubious Bill O'Reilly book is more accurate than Speilberg's film

By now you've been barraged by publicity about Steven Spielberg being so obsessed with accuracy that he even recorded Lincoln's actual pocket watch for the soundtrack of Lincoln.
     You may also have heard of all the factual errors in the book that Fox gasbag Bill O'Reilly coauthored with Martin Dugard.

      Now Asawin Suebsaeng, writing in Mother Jones, writes that the screenwriter of the National Geographic TV movie, Killing Lincoln, based on the problematic O'Reilly/Dugard book, cleaned up his source material so well that the result is actually more truthful than the Spielberg film, according to George Washington University history professor Tyler Anbinder: "I thought the film was exceedingly accurate, more so than Spielberg's," the professor... wrote in an email after viewing the movie for Mother Jones.

"As a history lesson, [Killing Lincoln] was very good; it stuck very closely to the facts of the story, and resisted the temptation to add imagined detail for the sake of exploring the motives of the characters involved," Anbinder said. "In that sense, this movie is better than Spielberg's Lincoln, which added fictional events to the story (Lincoln's son's obsession with slavery, for example) to try to create a motivation for Lincoln to abolish it."

     Anbinder did take issue with Killing Lincoln's inflation of the celebrity of Lincoln's assassin:

...this film made Booth appear far more famous in his day than he really was. His brother Edwin was a star as was his father Junius. John Wilkes was really a B-list actor. I tell my students he was more on par with Billy Baldwin than Alec. You knew who he was, but mostly thought of him in terms of his more famous brother and father.

     Spielberg's Lincoln has been aggressively criticized for misrepresenting several things, most notably Connecticut's vote on abolishing slavery.