Henry O'Brien
To the general public, Washington Post reporting duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are synonymous with reporters taking on an institution and exposing corruption from within. Their reporting on the Watergate scandal remains the stuff of legend in documentaries, books and (for the purposes of this website) the film All the President’s Men. It’s a narrative set in stone about how journalists can genuinely hold truth-to-power.
But lost in the shuffle of these stories is how journalists can mess up, continue reporting after their so-called greatest triumph and how their reporting can not only shape America, but define its ills. Documentarians Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus hone in on this exact line of thought in their new film, Cover-Up, which details the life and reporting of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In documenting Hersh’s journalism over the past half century, Poitras (All the Beauty and Bloodshed, Citizenfour) not only examines a reporter who still remains as dogged as ever, but she also uses Hersh’s career to channel how American institutions have been rotten to the core for quite some time. The results lead to a film that takes a hard look at all the material it covers, including Hersh himself.
It would be unfair to call Cover-Up a biography of Hersh’s life since the documentary barely focuses on his life outside of journalism. Indeed, the opening scene features a comical interaction between Hersh and Poitras where the latter describes his distrust of the documentary crew before immediately jumping into his reporting on the My Lai massacre of 1968. From the jump, Hersh describes how he separated himself from fellow journalists at the Pentagon who ate up anything that was given to them by official spokespersons.
The film places Hersh in direct opposition to not just the institutions he covers, but to other journalists as well. While not explicitly saying most of the news media is complicit in doing the U.S. government’s bidding, Hersh’s results speak for themselves. Whether it be reporting on Vietnam, Watergate, malfeasance in corporate America, Hersh leaves no stone unturned and reveals the results one journalist can get with the right amount of doggedness and skepticism.
But at almost every turn, Hersh faces varying degrees of suppression and backlash in his pursuit of the facts. He initially struggled to have a single paper let him write about My Lai. He was the subject of taped White House conversations between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. He exposed The New York Times’ connections to corporate America while still being a staff writer there. When he reported on torture and abuse at the hands of the U.S. military, every day American citizens called into radio shows to declare him unpatriotic.
A recurring visual motif throughout the film is of Hersh, with briefcase in hand, walking headfirst into big halls of power. He looks small compared to the giant institution he is figuratively going to take on in his reporting, which only heightens how critical he was in exposing the wrongdoings that happen in the name of America.
But don’t mistake Cover-Up to shower nonstop effusive praise toward Hersh. He has over half a century of bylines and he made high profile mistakes or questionable decisions, including a 2023 story on his Substack, where he alleged the U.S. “took out the Nord Stream pipeline.” In the moment, Poitras pushes back on Hersh’s insistence that using a single anonymous source can seem questionable for a story of such gravity. And Hersh, being a journalist proud of his work, defends his methods even as they fly in the face of typical journalism practice.
From there, the documentary comes to a sudden halt as Hersh genuinely seems rattled by Poitras’ questions, before saying he would complete the film because he gave them his word. Moments like these separate Poitras and Obenhause from the pack of many documentarians working today. They are not only unafraid to challenge their subject, but also let the film reflect the uncomfortable tension between interviewer and interview subject. In a time when so many documentaries act as commercials for its subject (where they must be an executive producer on the project in order to be interviewed), it’s genuinely refreshing to see Cover-Up rise above that.
The film pivots back into Hersh’s reporting in his later years. But that still include massive works like his groundbreaking reporting on torture at Abu Ghraib and continuing reporting on the atrocities in Gaza.
Balancing this skepticism of Hersh’s shortcomings and his reporting has shifted national conversations, giving the film its ultimate statement: No journalist, including Seymour Hersh, is perfect. But, now more than ever, having reporters like Hersh will be needed to take on further corruption and scandal within these United States.
