<\/p>\n
\u201cIn case anyone cares,\u201d the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh moans somewhere in the middle of Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus\u2019 documentary Cover-Up, \u201cthis is becoming less and less fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hersh, who broke the stories of the My Lai massacre and (along with 60 Minutes II) the torture at Abu Ghraib, is perhaps as close to a living legend as the last 50 years of American journalism has produced. If he\u2019s not a household name on the level of Woodward and Bernstein, with whom he traded scoops on the Watergate break-in, it might be because his career is too far-reaching to be reduced to a single story, or maybe it\u2019s just that he was never portrayed by Dustin Hoffman. But he\u2019s a tricky subject for a documentary, because, as Cover-Up establishes right at the outset, he\u2019s not crazy about being reported on himself.<\/p>\n
Poitras, the director of the Peabody-winning All the Beauty and the Bloodshed<\/a> and the Oscar-winning Citizenfour<\/a>, spent 20 years trying to convince Hersh to sit in front of her camera, but not even teaming up with Obenhaus, Hersh\u2019s past collaborator on films for PBS\u2019s Frontline, could put their subject at ease. The pair seem to have planned a kind of procedural deep dive, not just recounting Hersh\u2019s many scoops but detailing how he got them. But while the film shows stacks of bankers boxes filled with documents relating to Hersh\u2019s articles, he rebels almost immediately at the thought of opening them up, lest he inadvertently expose a past source. \u201cThis is all supposed to be after death,\u201d he protests, and while he\u2019s talking about preserving his contacts\u2019 anonymity, it seems like he would also sooner die than risk exposing himself.<\/p>\n Poitras\u2019 movies about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are both procedurals and portraits, consumed by two questions: What does it take to break through the walls of secrecy erected around powerful institutions\u2019 misdeeds, and what kind of person is willing to do it? In Hersh\u2019s case, that means an abiding commitment to justice coupled with overwhelming determination and confidence to match. When, in 1972, he thought it was time for the New York Times to hire him, he sent editor A.M. Rosenthal a letter that began, \u201cHow about a job?\u201d Without that self-assurance, Hersh might not have been able to persist in penetrating the layers of deceit and obfuscation that make great journalism such a difficult and draining process. But it hasn\u2019t always stood him in good stead in recent decades. His alternate history of the killing of Osama bin Laden was widely criticized for relying largely on a single unnamed source, and allowed James Kirchick, writing in Slate in 2015, to dismiss him as a mere \u201ccrank<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In Cover-Up, Hersh readily admits that he\u2019s made errors, but his admission veers past frank to glib: \u201cIf I have ever made the claim to be perfect \u2026 I withdraw it.\u201d At one point, he\u2019s questioned about a story based on information from a longtime source, and Hersh snaps back that if this new story is wrong, \u201cI\u2019ve been wrong for 20 years.\u201d As he asks it, the question isn\u2019t soul-searching but rhetorical: Of course he hasn\u2019t been wrong. But then he is the person whom Richard Nixon is on tape describing as \u201ca son of a bitch\u2014but he\u2019s usually right, isn\u2019t he?\u201d<\/p>\n Hersh describes himself as someone whose talent for instantly connecting with strangers was honed behind the counter of his family\u2019s dry-cleaning store when he was a teenager. But, like Snowden and Assange, he seems now like a person hardened by too many years of poking into the shadows, someone whose paranoid hunches were proved right too often for him to ever let down his guard. \u201cIt\u2019s complicated to know who to trust,\u201d he tells the filmmakers, whom he has known for decades. \u201cI mean, I barely trust you guys.\u201d<\/p>\n At one point, in fact, Hersh very nearly quits the film on-camera, after Poitras and Obenhaus push too hard about wanting to get a look at his notes. He\u2019s concerned about revealing the origins of his information, of course\u2014what little look we do get at his battered yellow legal pads includes several sections that are blurred or blacked out (although, given how challenging it is to read what we are able to see, I\u2019m not sure the camouflage was entirely necessary). But this opacity also serves to keep Hersh\u2019s work as a black box of its own, resting on a kind of bedrock faith in prestigious journalistic outlets\u2014surely the Times or the New Yorker wouldn\u2019t publish it if it wasn\u2019t so\u2014that can be scarce in the present era. That\u2019s not to say that Hersh falls back on institutional credibility: He all but says that the New York Times fired him when he proposed to turn the same investigative tools he had used on the federal government toward reporting on corporate interests. And he hardly has that to back him up anymore: Although Hersh\u2019s New Yorker bio still lists him as a \u201cregular contributor,\u201d he hasn\u2019t published in the magazine since 2015 and now does most of his writing on Substack. His oversight has diminished, along with his influence.<\/p>\n Hersh allows that his famed Abu Ghraib scoop might not even have been published if he hadn\u2019t had those indelible images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners to accompany it: \u201cNo photos, no story.\u201d But it was Hersh\u2019s words, and his byline, that gave those images weight, connecting the abuses committed in one misbegotten war to one begun almost 40 years earlier. Follow Hersh\u2019s life and his work through the decades, as Cover-Up does, and the dwindling of his kind of no-words-minced reporting seems like a dark development indeed. Cover-Up introduces Hersh with a slowed-down shot from an old television interview, stretching out the moment so he seems to be gazing into the middle distance, as if he\u2019s shouldering the weight of all the world\u2019s evils. But on that same broadcast, he\u2019s asked about the denials of his My Lai story, and responds, without equivocation, that the Army is \u201clying through its teeth.\u201d Imagine if mainstream reporters could still speak so plainly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIn case anyone cares,\u201d the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh moans somewhere in the middle of Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus\u2019 documentary Cover-Up, \u201cthis is becoming less and less fun.\u201d Hersh, who broke the stories of the My Lai massacre and (along with 60 Minutes II) the torture at Abu Ghraib, is perhaps as close to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2018281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[370446,347644,370445,370447,370444,370441,370443,370442,370448],"class_list":["post-2018280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-american-journalism","tag-dustin-hoffman","tag-edward-snowden","tag-investigative-reporter","tag-julian-assange","tag-laura-poitras","tag-mark-obenhaus","tag-seymour-hersh","tag-woodward-and-bernstein"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/A-New-Movie-Takes-On-the-Man-Who-Exposed-Some.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2018280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2018281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2018280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2018280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2018280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}