By DAVE ITZKOFF

A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency that is being prepared by the History channel does not yet have a cast . Not a frame of footage has been shot. It does, however, have critics who want it brought to a halt.

The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say that they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of fact and emphasis. The dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself.

The mini-series, called “The Kennedys,” is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show “24” and an outspoken political conservative.

Now a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is releasing an Internet video in which Kennedy scholars say the scripts offer a portrait of the Kennedys that is, at best, inaccurate and, at worst, a hatchet job.

“It was political character assassination,” the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, said of the screenplays. “It was sexist titillation and pandering .” He said hoped his video and petition, at stopkennedysmears. com, would take on lives of their own .

Stephen Kronish, the screenwriter of “The Kennedys,” who said he identifies himself as a liberal Democrat, said: “Next year, when it’s done and it’s on the air, if people want to criticize it, so be it.”

The critics say the “Kennedys” screenplays contain many factual errors . For example, they say that the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented; and that President Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.

They also say the scripts invent scenes that never occurred, like an exchange that suggests Kennedy came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall.

As Mr. Sorensen bluntly says in the video, “Every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”

In another scene cited, a Secret Service agent approaches the president while he is having sex in a pool with a woman who is not his wife; in another, the president asks his brother Robert, “What do you do when you’re horny?” and tells him that if he doesn’t have sex with unfamiliar women “every couple of days I get migraines.”

Mr. Kronish said that he was “not out to destroy the sacred cow” of the Kennedy presidency . President Kennedy “was part of my youth and the first president I was aware of,” he said. “But there are things that are part of their story and aren’t admirable, because they were human.”