I was curious about a comment that my history teacher made about John Green's Crash Course videos the other day. He stated that he started to progressively feel that Green's videos had an extremely biased view on history. Now when I've watched some of his videos, I do admit that I have noticed a bit of a slight bias in how he presents his information. Considering that I am not any sort of eclectically based historical scholar by any stretch of the word, I cannot truly say that I feel 100% confident in my opinion on this. Is there any Historians on this subreddit who could concur with my teacher's viewpoint on John Green, and even go further in explaining his specific biases?
Everyone has bias. I try very hard to acknowledge my biases at various points in the series (and it's important to remember it's not just MY biases either, but also those of the writers and curriculum consultants for the show, the biases of the editors and of thought cafe, the biases of American History curricula, et cetera). But I'm sure there are many biases I'm not even aware of.
I do take some pleasure, though, in being attacked in comments almost equally for my supposed eurocentric capitalist propaganda and for supposed anti-western bleeding heart liberalism.
(Personally, I am in fact obnoxiously centrist--probably my greatest bias, historically and personally, is toward stability over radicalism or revolution.)
To quote Zinn, an important American historian: "You can't be neutral on a moving train." Green does have bias, as does every historian. I think the biggest factor, however, on how he presents information is the format of his shows. He needs to present information in a very shallow (which isn't necessarily a bad thing for introductory-level material) manner in order to cover topics in the time he has allotted and keep the audience's attention.
You can find some old responses here, but they are old. I can agree with the general gist of them: Crash Course is exactly what it claims to be. It's a YouTube series that covers historical topics. It's not a published book or journal, and it doesn't claim to be research of any sort. To hold to any greater standards would be silly, and it fulfills that role decently. For specific critiques you'd have to ask about specific episodes.
Two things to note that I haven't seen before:
John Green knows her's not an authority. He has gone so far as to aplogize on reddit and remove poor videos. That gets all kinds of respect.
My one issue that I've seen occasionally is that he will critique popular misconceptions without replacing them with anything substantial. This is most evident in one of his on the Renaissance. He argues that Renaissance wasn't really "a thing" and does an admirable job critiquing common conceptions of it. But after tearing it down, he doesn't build it back up with a discussion on responsible, useful periodization. One might call that too complex, but it's important to at least mention.