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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-14/science-of-gossip.webp" alt="Gossip and history" loading="lazy" />
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Cruz said: 
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"History is like tsismis. It is filtered and dagdag na rin ... Andoon na iyong idea, pero may mga bias pa rin talaga." 
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Historian Ambeth Ocampo, the famous collector of historical trivia, was livid and pontificated, in a Facebook post: 
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"Don't confuse history and chismis. History may have bias but it is based on fact, not opinion. Real History is about Truth, not lies, not fiction."
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This 26-year-old actor - I'm not sure if she even completed her college degree in communications arts at Angelicum - seems to have more insights into what history is than Ocampo, a PhD and professional historian, at least on the subject of the role of gossip and history.
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In the first place, it is inexcusable for an academic to use a straw man argument. Cruz did not say history is tsismis (gossip).
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What Cruz said was: "History is <b>like</b> tsismis." Apparently Ocampo is incapable of understanding the English word "like",  and much less the concept of "analogy." I can only imagine what Ocampo would think of the late great comedian George Burns' quip: "Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope."
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Cruz was not saying that history is tsismis which obviously it isn't. She said that it has characteristics like gossip, in that certain kinds of gossip prove true, while others prove false. There is gossip that is filtered and enhanced ("dagdag"), just as "history" - an interpretation of the past - changes. What's wrong with that?
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<h3>
Thucydides
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What Cruz is saying is what actually has been the basic principles of good historians like Edward Carr (who wrote What is History) and more recently by professor James Banner who wrote a very enlightening piece in the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities: 
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"Ever since Thucydides dismissed Herodotus, historians have differed about the past. "
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One of the important insights in this piece, which Ocampo and Marcos-hating academics seem astonishingly clueless about, is the following:
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"A fundamental feature of historical thought is the distinction between ‘the past' and ‘history.' What we call ‘the past' is just that: It's what happened at some point before now. Once it occurs, ‘the past' is gone forever - beyond repeating, beyond reliving, beyond replicating.
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It's recoverable only by the evidence, almost never complete, that it leaves behind; and that evidence must be interpreted by individual humans - historians principally, but archaeologists, anthropologists and others.
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<h3>
History
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Distinct from "the past" are the narratives and analyses that historians offer about earlier times. That's what we call "history." History is what people make of the forever-gone past out of surviving documents and artifacts, human recall, and such items as photographs, films and sound recordings.
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The Yellows have been the masters of rumors-turned-fake-history