"Zero Dark Thirty," Circa 1950

"In World War II the Pentagon would have blanched at such an episode in fictional film form," the article states. "The War Department made special efforts to refute Nazi propagandists who claimed U.S. Paratroops and 'Hermans' (airborne infantrymen) killed German prisoners they captured when they dropped back of the front during the Normandy Invasion."

The difference, Weisman notes, is that "The Steel Helmet' was conceived as fiction, while "Zero Dark Thirty" is based on a true story.

That difference is also what irks Michael Wolff, who suggests that filmmakers are still getting a pass on dramatizations, even when adopting the more marketable label of "based on a true story." The images in film are more likely to be accepted as history than a book that has a much smaller audience.

Wolff writes in The Guardian, "A non-fiction writer couldn't do this. If you did this and maintained, to the extent that the makers of Zero Dark Thirty appear to maintain, that this was true, and with as little documentary evidence, either no one would publish you or you would have to invent evidence to get published. And then, you'd invariably be found out, scandal would ensue and your name would be blackened.

"Movies, on the other hand, even when they represent themselves to be non-fiction like Zero Dark Thirty, are still what we accept as a 'dramatization', so therefore not really real. How that is different from a non-fiction author using novelizing techniques to bring to life his story – and subsequently being humiliated by Oprah when he turns out to have significantly stretched the truth – I don't know."