Back in the 1977, the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shifted his focus from geopolitics to the world of corporate impropriety. After exposing the massacre at My Lai and the paid silencing of the Watergate scandal, Hersh figured it was time to mix it up a bit. In Cover-Up, in an almost sterile, clinical manner, Hersh explains for maestro documentarian Laura Poitras, in collaboration with Mark Obenhaus, the dogged manner in which he pursued this and so many other landmark moments. But for his efforts, he had to leave The New York Times. His reporting implicated the very company for which he worked. “Let’s just say they didn’t throw me a goodbye party,” he wryly says.
Hersh and Poitras fit together like hand in glove. Exceptional warriors for absolute truth and justice, both have made careers out of exposing systemic abuses of power in ways that have often made them enemies of the state – and yet, both have been granted unusual access to the truth. Poitras, who won the Best Documentary Oscar for a different portrait of a brave whistleblower in Citizenfour (and has two other nominations to her name), goes at it a bit more conventionally with Close-Up. At least on its surface, the film is perhaps more in line with her Obenhaus’s more straightforward approach. But underneath that is a scourge against mass media’s “self-censorship,” as Hersh calls it, an American practice where journalists and media conglomerates refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. can, in fact, be the bad guy.
Poitras’ Portrait of Hersh Hides an Uglier Truth About American News’ Culpability in Empire
In contrast with his journalistic persona as a relentless truth-teller, Hersh is much more cagey with his own details. From the moment Poitras and Obenhaus introduce him on screen, he is prickly and combative. He is keen to share the details of his more sparkling achievements but unwilling – and even frustrated at the implication – to share his sources or methods. Partly, it seems, Hersh is merely intent on protecting the safety of high-ranking officials, diplomats, soldiers, politicians and the like who have risked their lives in telling Heresh what they know, but you also get the sense that Hersh can be a stubborn mule who doesn’t wish to give into his detractors who allege that he can be guilty of suiting facts to his story rather than the other way around.
Whatever the case, the film tells the bulk of his story through his own words. Hersh is essentially only ever seen at one location – at his desk, with papers splayed, and boxes upon boxes crowding his study. Methodically, Hersh brings us through his most major career moments in reportage: from exposing the massacre at My Lai, where one Lieutenant Calley had to take the fall for the military’s systematic murdering of Vietnamese civilians, to his recent report about the Biden administration’s supposed sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline, which carries Russian natural gas to mainland Europe (for the latter, Hersh only used one anonymous source, which has led to skepticism from his peers).
To accompany Hersh’s own testimony of his own work, Poitras and Obenhaus pepper in scores of archival footage and talking heads from Hersh’s contemporaries and colleagues. Through it all, the filmmakers mission becomes clear: less a portrait of an uncommon civic hero than a derision against those who are not like him. Crucially, the film shows us how, through all of these breakthroughs, the media landscape was overwhelmingly opposed to assisting in the publication of these reports. When Hersh exposed how American research into biological weapons and nerve gas had killed thousands of sheep, the military put out statement after statement refuting his report; most major newspapers published stories arguing their propaganda, sometimes verbatim.
The same happened during Vietnam. Hersh relays how he saw how Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford, would simply call the New York Times to tell them what to pubish. “Nobody wants to say the army is lying through its teeth,” Hersh says, and his career has clearly been a mission of finding journalistic partners who can find the bravery to do so.
In ways both explicit and impicit, Poitras threads the needle between Hersh’s work during Vietnam and his current work now, with Gaza. As Hersh exposes how the Israeli Defense Forces have deliberately targeted civilians, Poitras collapses time and space to connect it with his past writing on the CIA’s illegal campaign to silence the student movement and associate it with communist sympathy. Considering how much reporting on the 2024 campus protests nefariously and erroneously cast students as terrorist sympathizers, Poitras and Obenhaus’s connection is clear, and devastating.
After Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate, Hersh was the first other journalist to join the fray. And, when he did, the duo called him to thank him. “It’s lonely here,” Woodward told Hersh. Lonely on the island where intrepid journalism still lives. As Poitras and Obenhaus indicate, that loneliness wouldn’t exist so much if there was less capitulation to the word of a regime, here or elsewhere. Watching this Netflix film in the wake of its imminent buyout of Warner Bros., it becomes clearer than ever before: Hersh was a rare breed in his younger days, and he certainly is now. And we need more like him.
Cover-Up released theatrically in LA, SF and DC on December 5th. It will open in NY on December 19th, and then go to Netflix on December 26th, 2025.
- Release Date
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December 26, 2025
- Runtime
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117 minutes
- Director
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Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus
- Producers
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Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, Olivia Streisand
Cast
