And here I thought the author was making a pithy observation about the fact that history is always written by the victors, and therefor almost always a form of disinformation about the losers.
The most prominent example is the American Civil War, where great effort was made to propagandize it as The Lost Cause. But other examples include German histories of World War I and Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War.
The Onion made a joke out of it, but in a sense it really is an example that the history of rock was written by the losers.
https://www.theonion.com/history-of-rock-written-by-the-lose...
You should look into some of the things that were only able to pass Congress once the Southern states were no longer around to oppose them. The Pacific Railroad Acts are a big example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts
edit: covered in the comments elsewhere, i see!
If it was all disinformation, you and I wouldn't know anything about it! It's just an easy (and obviously false) answer to say it's all disinformation. The challenge is how to handle the some bad inputs and output progress and good things for our neighbors. It's very doable; generations have accomplished a lot since we lived in caves; what are we doing for the next generation?
The winners of history are often too busy with enjoying the spoils of their victory and building up their newly won empire to have time to produce historical narrative, while the losers often have nothing better left to do in their exile/imprisonment or similar situation.
You know, I always thought this too, but the US Civil War history is a very good counter example.
Southerners had an outsized influence on civil war history in two ways that I know of.
One was the Lost Cause ideology [0].
The second was in writing about the war and its participants. For example, understating the number of troops Robert E. Lee had at decisive battles to make him look better.
The Lost Cause mythology is alive and well. While there’s a good deal of new scholarship looking at the historiography of the civil war.
[0] https://time.com/5013943/john-kelly-civil-war-textbooks/