In the vast, shifting landscape of American political discourse, where the ephemeral nature of digital news often erodes the bedrock of historical memory, the arrival of the new documentary Cover-Up feels less like a cinematic premiere and more like a seismic intervention. Directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras and the veteran producer Mark Obenhaus, this sprawling, meticulous, and deeply unnerving film serves as a forensic examination of the American security state’s impulse to bury its darkest deeds. It is a work that demands attention not merely for its subject—the legendary and often controversial investigative journalist Seymour Hersh—but for its profound meditation on the mechanics of truth-telling in an era increasingly defined by institutional obfuscation and the weaponization of “fake news”.
The film, which has already garnered significant attention following its debut at the Venice Film Festival and screenings at the New York Film Festival, stands as a testament to the persistence required to drag the machinery of state secrecy into the light. It is a political thriller disguised as a biography, a procedural drama that strips away the romantic mythology of the “scoop” to reveal the grinding, obsessive, and often perilous labor that underpins the Fourth Estate. As the narrative unfolds, weaving together five decades of reporting that ranges from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, Cover-Up forces its audience to confront a chilling thesis: that the atrocities of the past are not aberrations, but rather systemic features of an imperial power that has learned to hide its crimes with increasing sophistication.
A Portrait of the Reporter as an Old Man
At the center of this storm stands Seymour “Sy” Hersh, a figure who, at 88 years old, remains as “punchy,” “prickly,” and fiercely principled as the young reporter who first broke the story of the My Lai massacre in 1969. The documentary adopts a behavioral approach to portraiture, eschewing the polished, talking-head reverence typical of the genre in favor of a raw, observational style that captures the “garrulous, sometimes cranky” energy of its subject. Poitras and Obenhaus present Hersh not as a saintly crusader, but as a relentless operative, a man who carries his caution “like armor” and whose “ferocious drive” to uncover wrongdoing borders on the pathological.
The film’s genesis is itself a story of persistence that mirrors Hersh’s own methodology. Laura Poitras, whose previous works such as Citizenfour and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed have firmly established her as a preeminent chronicler of the surveillance state and institutional accountability, first approached Hersh about a documentary in 2005. At that time, Hersh was in the midst of his explosive reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for The New Yorker, a story that had once again placed him in the crosshairs of the Bush administration. Wary of becoming the story rather than the storyteller, and protective of the anonymous sources who entrusted him with their lives, Hersh “politely declined”. It would take nearly two decades of negotiation, and the intervention of co-director Mark Obenhaus—a longtime friend and collaborator who had worked with Hersh on the film Buying the Bomb—before the journalist finally agreed to open his archives and sit for the camera.
This transparent admission of the struggle for access serves as the film’s opening gambit, immediately signaling to the viewer that trust is a currency that must be earned, negotiated, and jealously guarded. The Hersh that emerges from this process is a complex figure: a “lone wolf” who nevertheless relies on a vast network of editors, fact-checkers, and deep-throat sources; a man who is “suspicious” of everything, including the filmmakers documenting his life. In one of the film’s most revealing moments, Hersh is shown in his office, a space described by Poitras as a “time-warp machine” stacked with “gravity-defying yellow notepads” and piles of classified documents. This chaotic archive is the physical manifestation of his brain—a repository of secrets that powerful men would kill to keep buried.
The Formative Years: From the Chicago Streets to the Pentagon
Cover-Up devotes significant narrative real estate to Hersh’s origin story, arguing that his unique journalistic ethos was forged not in the elite institutions of the Ivy League, but in the gritty, corrupt reality of mid-century Chicago. Born to Jewish Eastern European immigrants, Hersh grew up helping his father run a laundry and dry cleaning business, a blue-collar environment where he learned the essential skill of “how to talk to people”. This ability to connect with individuals from all walks of life—from the laundry customer to the four-star general—would become his superpower.
The film traces his evolution from a student at a two-year college, where an English teacher recognized his talent, to his enrollment at the University of Chicago and his subsequent employment at the legendary City News Bureau. It was here, working as a police reporter, that Hersh “fell in love with being a reporter”. The documentary posits that the Chicago police beat was the perfect training ground for covering the Pentagon. Navigating the “mob scene” of the city and witnessing police corruption firsthand taught him to “see tyranny up close” and instilled in him a profound skepticism of official narratives. He learned early on that authority figures lie, that police reports are often fictions, and that the truth is usually found in the margins, whispered by those with a guilty conscience.
This street-level instinct proved devastatingly effective when applied to the national stage. Cover-Up details how, during the Vietnam War, Hersh developed an unorthodox methodology for cultivating sources within the military establishment. While his peers in the press corps dutifully attended Pentagon briefings to be spoon-fed the daily spin, Hersh would roam the halls, looking for officers who seemed disillusioned or burdened by what they knew. He developed the technique of inviting high-ranking officials to lunch in relaxed settings, where he would simply “get out of the way” and let them talk. This “behavioral sense”—knowing when to push and when to listen—allowed him to penetrate the wall of silence that surrounded the U.S. war machine.
The Anatomy of a Massacre: My Lai and the Breaking of Silence
The documentary’s treatment of the My Lai massacre is a masterclass in historical reconstruction. It takes the viewer back to 1969, a pivotal year when the anti-war movement was gaining momentum but the full scale of the horror in Vietnam was still largely hidden from the American public. Hersh, then a freelancer for the upstart Dispatch News Service, broke the story that U.S. Army troops had systematically slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai.
Cover-Up does not merely recount the facts of the massacre; it dramatizes the “painstakingness” of the investigation. Viewers are taken through the process of how Hersh tracked down Lieutenant William Calley, the officer charged with the killings, and how he located the soldiers who had participated in the carnage. The film highlights the “obsessiveness” required to piece together such a story when the entire military apparatus is geared toward suppression. Hersh’s reporting did more than just expose a war crime; it shattered the myth of American moral superiority and galvanized the global opposition to the war. The film uses this segment to establish its central thematic arc: that the exposure of such atrocities is never an accident, but the result of a deliberate, often lonely, struggle against an institution designed to protect itself at all costs.
Watergate: The Burglars, the Hush Money, and the White House
While the narrative of the Watergate scandal is often dominated by the figures of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Cover-Up reclaims Seymour Hersh’s pivotal role in bringing down the Nixon presidency. The documentary reminds us that Watergate was not a monolithic story owned by a single newspaper, but a fierce competitive war between journalists.
Through interviews and archival footage, the film details Hersh’s reporting for The New York Times, specifically his focus on the “plumbers”—the team of burglars paid to execute the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Co-director Mark Obenhaus explains that it was Hersh who connected the dots regarding the hush money, revealing that the burglars were still being paid even after their indictment. This crucial piece of reporting implied that they were on the payroll of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, thereby linking the burglary directly to the White House and the Republican Party long before the full scope of the conspiracy was understood.
This section of the film serves as a powerful corrective to the historical record, illustrating the “doggedness” that defined Hersh’s approach. It also underscores the film’s broader argument about the nature of power: that corruption is rarely the work of rogue elements, but is almost always orchestrated from the top down. Hersh’s work on Watergate, combined with his reporting on the secret bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s domestic spying program, paints a portrait of a government at war with its own constitution—a theme that resonates disturbingly with the present day.
The Surveillance State: From the ‘Family Jewels’ to the War on Terror
The documentary’s exploration of the CIA’s domestic spying program, which Hersh exposed in 1974, provides a thematic bridge to Laura Poitras’s own body of work. Hersh’s revelation that the CIA had been conducting illegal surveillance on anti-war activists and other dissident groups—a scandal that led to the formation of the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission—is presented with a distinct visual and sonic flair. The filmmakers utilize the “tape flap and static” of archival recordings to evoke the texture of surveillance, creating a “past-future language” that connects the analog spying of the 1970s with the digital panopticon of the 21st century.
This continuity of state overreach culminates in the film’s harrowing examination of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. In 2004, writing for The New Yorker, Hersh exposed the systematic torture and abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces in Iraq. The documentary features the testimony of Camille Lo Sapio, one of Hersh’s previously anonymous sources, who provided him with the graphic photographs that shocked the world. These images—of naked prisoners piled in pyramids, of hooded figures standing on boxes—are revisited not for their shock value, but to demonstrate the necessity of visual evidence in a post-truth world. Hersh notes that without the photographs, the story would likely have been dismissed as enemy propaganda.
Poitras, who has described her own “state of despair” about the collapse of journalism during the post-9/11 era, frames Hersh’s Abu Ghraib reporting as a solitary beacon of dissent in a media landscape that had largely acquiesced to the government’s narrative. The film argues that Hersh was one of the few voices willing to question the “Bush doctrine” and the “horrible occupation” of Iraq, proving that the role of the investigative journalist is to stand apart from the pack, even when doing so invites accusations of being “anti-American”.
The Cinematic Language of Paranoia
Visually, Cover-Up is a tour de force of atmospheric tension. Poitras and Obenhaus, working with cinematographers like Mia Cioffi Henry, have crafted a film that looks and feels like a high-stakes political thriller. The “Pakula-esque” play of scenes—referencing the paranoid thrillers of Alan J. Pakula like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View—infuses the documentary with a sense of dread and unease. The editing, handled by a team that includes Poitras, Amy Foote, and Peter Bowman, eschews a strictly linear chronology in favor of a thematic structure that leaps across time, connecting the chemical weapon tests of the 1960s with the chemical warfare allegations of the Syrian Civil War.
The film’s opening sequence is particularly striking: it features footage from a 1968 news report in Utah, where a U.S. Army nerve agent test at the Dugway Proving Ground went awry, killing thousands of sheep. This imagery of “institutional recklessness” and the silent, invisible death that drifts across the landscape sets the tone for the entire film. It is a visual metaphor for the collateral damage of the security state—the innocent lives (whether sheep or civilians) that are sacrificed on the altar of national security.
The sound design further amplifies this immersion. In a sequence depicting Hersh working on his Iraq War reporting, the mundane sound of his typing is layered with the rhythmic, thumping sync sound of helicopter blades. This sonic superimposition collapses the distance between the reporter’s desk in Washington, D.C., and the war zone in Baghdad, reminding the viewer that the words on the screen have lethal consequences in the real world. It is a technique that transforms the act of writing into an act of war.
The Lone Wolf and the Pack: The Collaborative Dynamics
While Hersh is the undisputed star of the film, Cover-Up also sheds light on the collaborative nature of documentary filmmaking. The partnership between Poitras and Obenhaus is presented as a necessary synthesis of styles and temperaments. Poitras, the radical artist and activist, brings her visual sophistication and her thematic obsession with surveillance. Obenhaus, the veteran producer who has navigated the industry for decades, provides the steady hand and the personal connection to Hersh that made the film possible.
Obenhaus recounts the challenge of dealing with Hersh’s “orneriness” and “mood swings,” noting that he has been “angry at me so many times I couldn’t count”. Yet, the filmmakers’ affection for their subject is palpable. They treat him not just as a subject, but as a “much-loved relative,” albeit a difficult one. This intimacy allows for moments of genuine vulnerability, such as when Hersh, realizing he has accidentally revealed the identity of a source to the filmmakers, threatens to shut down the production. These scenes of “doubt and second-guessing” are crucial, as they reveal the high stakes of the game Hersh plays. For him, protecting a source is not just a professional obligation; it is a moral imperative that supersedes the demands of the film.
The Controversial Late Career: Syria, Nord Stream, and the Nature of Error
A documentary about Seymour Hersh would be incomplete without addressing the controversies that have defined his later career. As the media landscape has shifted toward open-source intelligence and data journalism, Hersh’s reliance on singular, anonymous deep-throat sources has drawn increasing scrutiny and criticism. Cover-Up does not shy away from these “credibility problems”.
The film tackles head-on Hersh’s 2013 reporting on the chemical weapons attacks in Ghouta, Syria, where he alleged that rebel forces, rather than the Assad regime, were responsible. This reporting was widely contradicted by UN investigators and other researchers, leading to accusations that Hersh had become a conspiracy theorist or an apologist for dictators. In a moment of startling candor, the documentary captures Hersh admitting his error regarding Assad. “Let’s call that wrong. Let’s call that very much wrong,” he says, withdrawing his previous claims to infallibility. This admission is a pivotal moment in the film, insulating it from accusations of hagiography and reinforcing its commitment to the truth, even when that truth is unflattering to its subject.
The documentary also explores Hersh’s 2023 report alleging that the United States and Norway were responsible for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. While this story was met with widespread skepticism by the mainstream press and contradicted by German investigations pointing to a pro-Ukrainian group, the film presents it as evidence of Hersh’s continued refusal to accept the “official record as gospel”. The filmmakers do not necessarily endorse the veracity of the Nord Stream claim, but they use it to illustrate Hersh’s enduring “war path” against the establishment. It raises the uncomfortable question of whether Hersh is a “crank” or whether he is simply the only one brave enough to ask the questions that no one else will touch.
The Critical Reception: A Mirror to the Media
Since its premiere, Cover-Up has polarized critics in a way that reflects the polarized nature of its subject. Many have hailed it as an “urgent and needed” documentary, praising its “rigorous portrait of truth-telling” and its ability to capture the “obsessiveness” of the investigative process. The review on RogerEbert.com awards the film a nuanced rating, highlighting its success as a “behavioral portrait” while noting that it may not reach the “critical heights” of Poitras’s masterpiece All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
Time magazine underscores the film’s cultural importance, noting that in an era where journalists are demonized and the concept of truth is under assault, Cover-Up serves as a vital reminder of the “critical role hard-hitting investigative reporting plays in a democracy”. Other critics have found the film to be a “hard watch” due to its unflinching depiction of institutional violence, but have ultimately recommended it as essential viewing. The divergence of opinion regarding Hersh’s late-career reporting mirrors the broader debate within the journalism community about the balance between access and verification, and the dangers of relying on anonymous sources in an age of disinformation.
Table 1: Key Historical Investigations Featured in ‘Cover-Up’
The following table summarizes the major investigative milestones covered in the documentary, illustrating the breadth of Hersh’s career and the systemic nature of the cover-ups he exposed.
| Investigation | Era | Key Revelation | Hersh’s Method | Outcome/Impact |
| My Lai Massacre | Vietnam War (1969) | U.S. troops slaughtered hundreds of unarmed civilians. | Tracked down Lt. Calley and interviewed participating soldiers. | Won Pulitzer Prize; fueled anti-war sentiment; shattered U.S. moral standing. |
| CIA Domestic Spying | 1970s | CIA conducted illegal surveillance on U.S. anti-war groups (Operation CHAOS). | Relied on deep insiders within the intelligence community. | Led to the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission reforms. |
| Watergate (The Plumbers) | 1970s | Burglars were paid hush money, linking the break-in to the White House. | Exposed the financial trail connecting the burglars to CREEP. | Implicated the Nixon administration in a criminal conspiracy. |
| Abu Ghraib Torture | Iraq War (2004) | Systemic torture and abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces. | Obtained graphic photos and testimony from insiders like Camille Lo Sapio. | Exposed the brutality of the War on Terror; sparked global outrage. |
| Syria Chemical Weapons | Syrian Civil War (2013) | Alleged rebels, not Assad, used Sarin gas (later admitted as error). | Relied on intelligence sources contradicting the official narrative. | Highly controversial; Hersh admits in the film: “Let’s call that wrong.” |
| Nord Stream Sabotage | Russia-Ukraine War (2023) | Alleged U.S./Norway covert operation to destroy pipelines. | Cited anonymous source with direct knowledge of the operation. | Met with skepticism; highlights Hersh’s continued adversarial stance. |
The Skunk at the Garden Party
In the final analysis, Cover-Up presents Seymour Hersh as the eternal “skunk at the garden party”—the unwelcome guest who refuses to adhere to the polite fictions of the Washington elite. The film argues that this role is not just a personal quirk, but a democratic necessity. In a system where power naturally seeks to shield itself from scrutiny, the only antidote is a journalist who is willing to be rude, abrasive, and relentless.
The documentary leaves the viewer with a profound sense of the fragility of truth. Hersh, surrounded by the detritus of a lifetime of reporting, continues to work, publishing his findings on Substack because the traditional gatekeepers of the media have grown wary of his methods. The film ends not with a victory lap, but with a question mark. Who will take up the mantle when Hersh is gone? In an age of corporate consolidation and algorithmic news feeds, is there still a place for the lone wolf who is willing to spend months chasing a lead that might go nowhere?
The Global Implications of American Impunity
While Cover-Up is deeply rooted in the specifics of American history, its resonance is global. The film portrays the United States as an imperial power whose internal “cycles of impunity” have devastating consequences for the rest of the world. From the villages of Vietnam to the pipelines of the Baltic Sea, the documentary maps the footprint of American power and the silence that often follows its deployment.
The film’s release on a global streaming platform ensures that this critique will be heard in over 190 countries. This is significant, as it allows international audiences to witness an internal critique of American power by American filmmakers. It challenges the monolithic narrative of U.S. benevolence often projected abroad, offering instead a nuanced, painful view of a nation struggling with its own conscience. The inclusion of perspectives on the Six-Day War and the broader context of Cold War geopolitics further situates Hersh’s work within the complex tapestry of international relations.
The Future of the Form
For Laura Poitras, Cover-Up represents a continuation of her career-long project to document the abuses of the post-9/11 world. By turning her lens on Hersh, she is acknowledging a debt of gratitude to the generation of journalists who paved the way for her own work. The film suggests that the torch has been passed, not just to other journalists, but to documentary filmmakers who are increasingly filling the void left by the decline of traditional investigative reporting.
The “machinery” of the film—its editing, its sound design, its archival research—demonstrates that the documentary form itself has become a primary vehicle for truth-telling. As newspapers shrink and budgets are slashed, films like Cover-Up provide the time, the resources, and the platform necessary to tell complex, difficult stories. It is a reminder that in the battle for history, the camera is as powerful a weapon as the pen.
A Call to Witness
Cover-Up is a demanding film. It asks its audience to sit with uncomfortable truths, to witness the horrific consequences of their government’s actions, and to question the narratives they are fed by the mainstream media. It is a film that refuses to offer easy answers or comforting resolutions. Instead, it offers the example of Seymour Hersh: a man who, despite his flaws and his errors, has never stopped digging.
As the credits roll, the viewer is left with the image of the “time-warp” office, the stacks of paper, and the old man still on the phone, still chasing the story. It is a powerful, enduring image of resistance. In a world where the truth is constantly under siege, Cover-Up asserts that the only way to fight back is to never stop asking questions, to never trust the official story, and to always, always follow the money.
For those ready to descend into this rabbit hole of secrets and lies, Cover-Up is available to a global audience via Netflix starting today.
