Is this the death of journalism – or just of history? This week sees the screening of Vice, a biopic of George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, who is presented as the evil genius behind the Iraq war, torture and other misdemeanours. Its maker, Adam McKay, makes no bones about wishing to nail the misdeeds of a man “about to sail over the horizon”. His star, Christian Bale, even “thanked Satan for giving me inspiration to play the role”.

Vice follows hard on the heels of the British dramatist James Graham’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, for Channel 4. That set out to reveal the truth about Brexit, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, the eccentric fixer behind the Vote Leave campaign. Graham declared a desire “to make sense of how the fault lines began … to do what journalism cannot do.”

The embellishments in Darkest Hour would have done credit to Russia’s Mosfilm or Mao’s China

Well, he is right on that. Journalism does not deliberately lie, like Darkest Hour lied, like The Crown lied, like All the Money in the World lied. Film-makers claim the right to mis-sell films as history, sexed up with invention. They do so not because they have researched history and found it wrong, but because they fear accuracy will not put bums on seats. They must make Brexit into Game of Thrones.

In attacking the accuracy of Vice in Slate, Fred Caplan suggests it owes more to Dr Strangelove and Mad magazine than to any known record of events. It was simply wrong to depict Cheney as “really in charge of the Bush administration”, let alone as going to war to aid his friends in the oil industry.

McKay’s line is that he tried to be “as truthful as humanly possible”. But he rejects aspiration to journalistic truth, wishing instead to present “a spray paint portrait, a Ralph Steadman portrait”. A disclaimer at the start of Vice merely says, “We did our fucking best” – perhaps their best at destroying Cheney.

Graham’s Brexit saga was enjoyable, and Cumberbatch outstanding. But, unlike in his behind-the-scenes play This House, the clear intention was to retell history through the real people whose actions “probably affected the outcome of the referendum”. Though scenes appeared more like Spitting Image than reality, Cumberbatch was desperate to imitate Cummings, even mimicking him while dining together, according to Cummings’ wife, Mary Wakefield. If Cumberbatch wanted to be so accurate, was it somehow to validate the inaccuracy of the script? Did Cummings really invent “Take back control”? Did he really sack John Mills from Vote Leave? Who knows, when all we do know is that some is true and some is not?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Though scenes appeared more like Spitting Image than reality, Cumberbatch was desperate to imitate Cummings.’ Photograph: Nick Wall/Channel 4

This is surely the essence. The discipline of history holds that if the historian, modern or ancient, falsifies a record for dramatic effect, the exercise collapses. Unless each fact is labelled true or false, the totality is false. The story is in the dramatist’s head, and has no right to claim faithfulness to history.

Two other films now on release, The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots, are brilliant period romps. One is “based on” Queen Anne’s relations with her two ladies-in-waiting, the other on Mary’s relations with Elizabeth I, complete with an invented meeting between them. Both are modernised tales of feminine machismo, their (female) actors speaking today’s foul-mouthed English and treating the male actors as toxic cartoons. The director of The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, remarked casually that “some of the things in the film are accurate and a lot aren’t”. What is a history student to make of that?

I am sure the distant past can look after itself. Peddlers of fake history always cite Shakespeare’s Richard III as their template. We should note that it took three centuries for historians to rescue Richard from that hatchet job. We might now ask how long it will take poor, dignified Queen Anne to recover from The Favourite – or can we rely on television’s admirable fib-chaser Lucy Worsley to do it first?

Historical bias is potent. Churchill remarked that history would be kind to him “as I intend to write it myself”. He did, and it was. The most disgraced interwar politician emerged as a saintly hero, single-handed slayer of the demon Hitler. He has remained so ever since. The embellishments in Darkest Hour would have done credit to Russia’s Mosfilm or Mao’s China.

More alarming is the appeal of current affairs to ratings-hungry producers. The stories of the British royal family, Dick Cheney, Brexit and – soon, we can be sure – Donald Trump have immediacy and relevance. They pander to the (mostly leftwing) biases of actors and directors, with invention excused as “artistic licence”. I recall the reply when I chided a director about his fabricating a scene. “I am an artist,” he said with a faint sneer. “You are a journalist.”

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Film-makers claim that everyone knows they make things up. I am not sure everyone does. But the fictions enter the record as attributed to historical figures. Directors discard the “suspension of disbelief” by using names, appearances, settings and spoken words to claim, “This is true. This happened. This is what history was really like.”

Journalists flatter themselves with the Washington Post’s claim to be “a first rough draft of history”. But they are charged, in the time available, to describe the world as it really is. They rightly call facts sacred. No serious journalist takes pride in inaccuracy. If it occurs, there are lawyers and regulators ready to demand correction.

When the likes of Trump accuse the world of fake news, we need tools, definitions, concepts of accuracy to rebut him. Why give him a free pass with fake instant history? If a newspaper declared on its front page, “These stories are based on real events, and some of them are true”, it would be laughed out of court. When films do it, they claim Oscars.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist