Documentarian Laura Poitras is audacious. Poitras revealed the paranoid patriotism that inspired Edward Snowden in Citizenfour amidst his political exile, and recently offered a sobering look at the ramifications of the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. While Seymour Hersh is a figure as gripping as any of her other subjects, Cover-Up is a more traditionally reflective piece of non-fiction filmmaking. Hersh may still be an active participant in investigative journalism, but a majority of Cover-Up is centered on the first half-century of his career.
What could’ve been a flaw of composure is Cover-Up’s greatest strength; Hersh has survived enough catastrophic global events to dull his reactive tendencies. The pragmatic, no-nonsense demeanor he’s crafted has primed him to be the spotlight of a documentary that has an obvious limitation on archive footage. He’s a cantankerous, direct conversationalist who doesn’t express any nostalgia for his early days as a journalist, but he’s also refused to hold any idealistic views on the future. Poitras isn’t interested in backing Hersh into arguments because he expresses his most blatant opinions over the course of an extended conversation.
At 88, Hersh was part of the most momentous controversies within contemporary American politics. Cover-Up isn’t divided between his personal and professional lives because they’re one and the same; Hersh was already a married man in 1964, five years before he exposed the My Lai massacre and its subsequent cover-up in the Vietnam War, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. While some of Hersh’s discoveries are well-known, such as the publication of 2004’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib" in The New Yorker, the methods used to achieve the truth are a testament to his relentlessness.
Despite having parameters in what she can depict, Poitras has crafted Cover-Up into a propulsive thriller about the rabble-rousing tactics used by Hersh to identify contacts and work himself into obscure scenarios. The choice to begin the film with Hersh’s documentation of Vietnamese villagers that were displaced, killed, and raped by American soldiers isn’t just an indication of his influence on global discourse, but a revelation about the chip on his shoulder. Hersh doesn’t spend much time in Cover-Up waxing poetic about the heroes of journalism, and still believes that he’s the shaggy farm boy from Illinois who was expelled from the Chicago University of Law.
Hersh might argue that his distance from the self-aggrandizing world of coastal journalism has given him a greater ability to use non-traditional channels, which in turn yielded some of his most significant discoveries. It was after a bridged contact with the relative of an acquaintance that Hersh obtained handbooks that detailed the brutal techniques used at the CIA black sites to interrogate suspected terrorist; it’s the type of potentially libelous report that could’ve landed him on a government watchlist, but the film already revealed through audio evidence that Hersh’s investigation into the Watergate scandal earned him the disdain of President Nixon. For someone like Hersh who’s risked his life and livelihood on multiple occasions, the only things that must unquestionably be protected are the truth and his sources; anything else is fair game.
The depth of Hersh’s experience is without question, as interviews in Cover-Up are occasionally interrupted amidst his ongoing reporting about the Gazan genocide. Although Hersh’s skepticism about Poitras’ intentions are noted from the beginning, as he reportedly denied her attempts at an interview for two decades, the film does lay out his belief that America has fundamentally the same issues as it did when he first put pen to paper. However, cynicism isn’t necessarily the same thing as wisdom, and the rare moments in which Poitras’ voice is incorporated square Hersh off against the gaps in his analysis.
Hersh is bound by urgency, and has reported on the emergence of developing situations with only a fraction of the story at hand. Cover-Up doesn’t suggest that he’s careless, but it does show instances in which Hersh’s reliance on a single source blew up in his face. It’s only briefly touched upon that Hersh’s willingness to fish for information has occasionally lent credence to unsubstantiated reporting with a clear political agenda. Hersh may have defended his off-the-cuff comments that Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich had disclosed information to WikiLeaks prior to his murder as a means to draw out sources, and feigned innocence by the fact that his written words are his only definitive truth. However, Hersh is far too accomplished to not recognize that his words carry weight; Cover-Up doesn’t completely involve Hersh in the subsequent Rich conspiracy theories that strengthened the hateful QAnon movement.
Hersh’s career is so vast that there are inevitably subjects left on the table; although there’s a brief segment about the alleged sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage, its role in the documentary is to show how Hersh transitioned to writing for Substack. The refusal to hold Hersh wholly accountable for some of his more salacious writing, including his coverage of the alleged affair between JFK and Marilyn Monroe, would suggest that Poitras may lionize her subject too much. Yet, Cover-Up is leaps and bounds above the majority of 2025’s documentaries because it has no interest in being presented as a traditional narrative. Journalism is messy, and Cover-Up understands the chaos and compromise that make it so fascinating.