Cover-Up

“It’s complicated to know who to trust. I barely trust you guys,” says Seymour Hersh. He’s speaking to the directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus about his career as an investigative reporter. Obenhaus is a veteran producer for PBS’s FRONTLINE who collaborated with Hersh on previous projects. Poitras is a Pulitzer- and Oscar–winning documentarian. She first reached out to Hersh 20 years ago hoping to profile him and then had a long wait. Persistence pays off in Cover-Up, one of the most gripping films ever made about journalism.

Time after time, Hersh has exposed brutal realities that governments and corporations wanted to cover up. He shares behind-the-scenes details of how he reported the My Lai massacre, Watergate, the operation of CIA spying on Americans, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, to name a few of his major headlines. Every step of the way, he faced fierce pushback from powerful interests. We hear President Nixon on tape saying, “This fellow Hersh is a son of a bitch.”

Hersh can be spiky and guarded. When the filmmakers push his boundaries, the interplay is fascinating and, at times, hilarious. This isn’t a tame retrospective look. It’s a complicated reflection on power and accountability, set to an evocative score by Maya Shenfeld. Hersh has a moral drive that continues to infuse his recent reporting on Gaza. As a young reporter covering the Pentagon, he had the epiphany: “There was this mass of truth out there.” He’s still determined to uncover it.

THOM POWERS