The documentarist Laura Poitras has developed a neat line in biographical profiles that also function as loaded commentary on American social and political life. 2014's Citizenfour tracked down the exiled Edward Snowden at the moment he'd become public enemy number one and thereby started to tackle the paranoia and skewed priorities of 21st century American doctrine; 2022's All the Beauty and the Bloodshed paid fulsome visual tribute to photographer Nan Goldin before turning the camera on the Sackler affair. The form is probably too elegant to be described as turduckenish - one meaty story slipped inside another, offering viewers something extra to chew over - but that's also what's going on within Poitras's latest Cover-Up. Here, the filmmaker uses a series of sitdowns with Seymour Hersh - veteran New York Times and New Yorker correspondent, prickly thorn in the side of US governments since Vietnam - to reflect upon the mounting issue of trust in the media. "It's complicated to know who to trust," states Hersh early on, effectively establishing the film's agenda before he turns a sharp eye on those filming him: "I don't even trust you guys." A certain tension persists between subject and observer(s). Poitras had been attempting to pin Hersh down on film for twenty years; ever-wily, the journo only agreed on the condition Poitras was accompanied behind the camera by Mark Obenhaus, the seasoned producer with whom Hersh had previously collaborated on several TV projects. In the interviews that followed, Hersh sometimes snipes at the filmmakers or himself - critical is what he is, speaking out what he does - but he reserves his most ferocious opprobrium for a wider press corps he regards as constitutionally incurious, cowed into writing what they're given and told rather than digging around or following up. Not once does Cover-Up invoke the name of the current inhabitant of the White House; the interviews were likely wrapped well before November 2024. Nevertheless, you may be getting some feel for how Poitras and Obenhaus's film speaks to the present moment.
For much of its 117 minutes, Cover-Up straddles two time periods simultaneously. The bulk of it concerns the past, in as much as the past can ever truly be considered the past: though blessed by a reporter's 20:20 recall, Hersh's war stories and field reports otherwise run a sorry gamut, from the My Lai massacre to the indignities of Abu Ghraib. As pristine and evocative as Goldin's photography, the archive footage lays all the brutality and the bloodshed out before us once more; the history is interpolated with Hersh's scribbled or typed notes and finished articles, the most damning quotes he ever took. The maxim that has sustained him over these fifty-odd years is "get out of the way of the story" - let your sources speak for themselves - a technique most potently borne out in the immediate wake of My Lai, in the words of mother lamenting what the U.S. Army had done to her child: "I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer." To the cinema, Hersh's recollections bring multiple elements: the inbuilt momentum involved in making a case against the murderous, whether at ground or state level, and the horror of the things he learnt, heard and saw on his travels ("Every day was another thirty years on my shoulders"). Just below that wearied surface, however, there is also a certain glee at pissing off the powers-that-be, in refusing to let them have everything entirely their way: "Every book I did got people mad." Here is a man who plainly relishes a challenge - who, indeed, sees the challenge good journalism represents as fundamental to Western democratic life.
Which returns us to the present, where Poitras found Hersh - now a silver-haired elder statesman - still asking questions and filing copy. (He's interrupted in the middle of one interview by a phone call from an editor, checking a phrase or two.) With the initial introductions made, an especially trenchant cut around the forty-minute mark reveals the area Hersh is focusing on today: Gaza, a process that involves fielding calls from anonymous sources with reports of Israeli bullets in Palestinian children's bodies. Hersh is Jewish himself: if he has anything like an origin story, it's the regret he feels for not asking his father, a Lithuanian Jew, about the murder of the latter's brethren by Soviet troops. The work is ongoing, because it's hardly as if there's been any let up in atrocities; the difference is that Hersh now mostly operates outside of conventional media structures. (At the time of filming, he has a Substack.) A certain amount of journo-fetishism remains visible in the film: the scribbled-over legal pads Hersh uses, footage of the NYT newsroom in its Watergate-era heyday, its reporters caught with sleeves rolled up and pipes in mouths. As with Poitras's Goldin doc, however, any hero worship is kept in check. The Hersh we meet here is stubborn and short-fused, often caught openly furious at the state of things; it's left to the viewer to realise these really aren't bad reasons to get into reporting, especially when combined with intelligence, rigour, an ability to admit (and learn from) your own mistakes and shortcomings - honesty, in brief - and a code of ethics that hasn't been bought out or otherwise compromised. Cover-Up was only ever going to get glowing reviews, stressing the importance of a robust and fearless press at a time when those in positions of corporate and political power would rather we be replaced by some combination of PR and AI. That shouldn't discount what the film's saying, though. Asked why he's repeatedly circled back to exposing state violence, Hersh remains typically resolute: "Because you can't have a country that does that. You just can't."
Cover-Up is now playing in selected cinemas, before streaming on Netflix from December 26.
