Few documentary films have the natural authority of a Ken Burns production. The narrator of his works, Peter Coyote, is as close as we have today to “the voice of God,” the phrase once associated with legendary CBS anchor Walter Cronkite at the height of broadcast news.

This makes it especially outrageous that Burns feeds the viewers of his new epic documentary, “The American Revolution,” a childish canard at the outset.

Burns implies that the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of six Indian tribes in New York State, crucially influenced the founding of the United States. This is a nice fairy tale, but has no connection to reality, and Burns and his colleagues — who worked on their project for a decade — had time to verify the claim.

At the beginning of the film, the narrator intones that “l

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