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IN COVER-UP, LAURA POITRAS INVESTIGATES SEYMOUR HERSH  
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A.J. Goldmann
December 3, 2025
Columbia Journalism Review
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_ The acclaimed filmmaker and investigative journalist on her
twenty-year project, the “crisis” in investigative journalism, and
how truth-telling can still change the world. _

Investigative journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitros, photo courtesy
Adam Joachim Goldmann

 

Laura Poitras, the journalist and documentary filmmaker, has the
rare distinction of having won a Pulitzer Prize (for her reporting on
the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden), an Academy Award
(for _Citizenfour_, about Snowden), and the Venice Film Festival’s
Golden Lion (for _All the Beauty and the Bloodshed_, about the artist
and activist Nan Goldin and the opioid crisis). Her new
film, _Cover-Up_, examines the career of Seymour M. Hersh—known for
his investigative journalism on My Lai and Abu Ghraib, as well as
other, more contested scoops—using archival material and exclusive
access to Hersh’s notes to probe how accountability journalism is
made. 

_Cover-Up_, which opens Friday in theaters in select cities ahead of
its Netflix premiere on December 26, returns Poitras to the familiar
intersection of government secrecy, source protection, and the
journalistic imperative to reveal what powerful institutions want
hidden. Codirected with Mark Obenhaus, the film is a political
thriller that offers a candid and illuminating look at Hersh’s
career and methods, what makes him tick, and why investigative
journalism matters today. Our conversation, which took place at the
New York office of Poitras’s production company Praxis Films, has
been edited for length and clarity.

AJG: LET ME START BY OBSERVING THAT _COVER-UP_ IS A VALUABLE ADDITION
TO THE SMALL CANON OF JOURNALISM MOVIES. YET I SEE IT AS MORE CLOSELY
IN CONVERSATION WITH FICTION FILMS THAN WITH OTHER DOCUMENTARIES. 

LP: It’s interesting that you reference that, because we definitely
were talking about fiction films when we began—we being myself, Amy
Foote, and Peter Bowman, the editors—in terms of how we were going
to approach its feel and aesthetics. And the films that we were
referring to were the 1970s paranoia thrillers, brilliant films that
were very skeptical and critical of the state and state power. Alan J.
Pakula was at the top of the list. _All the President’s Men _and
_The_ _Parallax View_ were the ones that we constantly referred to. I
make nonfiction, but I’m often making films that deal with threats
and dangers of the state. So it’s not like I’m stealing from the
genre of fiction, but rather, I think fiction steals from real life.

THIS IS A LONG-GESTATING PROJECT. YOU’VE SAID THAT YOU FIRST THOUGHT
ABOUT TRAINING YOUR CAMERA ON SEYMOUR HERSH AFTER READING HIS ABU
GHRAIB COVERAGE IN 2004. TELL ME MORE ABOUT THAT.

Twenty years ago, when I was preparing to go to Iraq, where I spent
eight months documenting the US occupation and the war, I felt very
strongly that we were living in a landscape where legacy journalism
was failing the public in terms of its coverage of the lead-up to this
war, its coverage of the Bush era, the “war on terror,” and how it
was reporting on Guantánamo Bay prison and torture. All this
nightmarish stuff was happening that we knew was happening, and by and
large, legacy media was copying the government’s press releases,
even to the point of respected news organizations having editorial
guidelines not to use the word “torture” to describe the CIA’s
torture. It was kind of staggering, and Sy was doing something very
different. He was reporting at _The New Yorker_ and asking: What is
actually going on? Why are we going to Iraq? And he was saying there
was no connection between the 9/11 attacks and Al Qaeda and Iraq, but
he _was_ drawing the connection between Dick Cheney and Halliburton
and all the money that was there and using the sort of emergency laws
that emerged after 9/11 to get in all these policies that the right
had been dreaming of for years. 

The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004, and I traveled to Iraq about
a month later. I had already made the decision to go, but then when I
saw those photographs, it was just a level of horror that I could not
imagine existed. The film that I ended up making there, _My Country,
My Country, _sort of began at Abu Ghraib because I managed to talk my
way into the prison that summer when Iraqis were inspecting it because
it was such an international scandal.

When I came back, I reached out to Sy and we met. I sort of laugh
about entering his office. There should have been _Twilight Zone_
music playing, because it really was like going back in time, with all
the yellow notepads that you see in the film. It was like time had
stopped in the 1970s in that office.

WHAT WAS YOUR IDEA FOR _COVER-UP_ IN 2005?

Back then, I was proposing to make a film that would follow him in
real time, so more observational: Sy meeting sources or in editorial
meetings at _The_ _New Yorker, _throwing things at the editors and
threatening to quit, which Amy Davidson Sorkin joked he would do on a
regular basis.

He entertained the idea, but after I left, he called me, and he was
like: _No way. I can’t risk my sources. _You know: _My sources are
too sensitive, and there’s no way a camera can be around._ So it was
a hard no, but a very gracious hard no. But we stayed in touch.

AND NEARLY TWENTY YEARS LATER, SY TELLS YOU HE’S READY FOR HIS
CLOSE-UP. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT WAS?

He certainly was aware of the reporting I did with Edward Snowden. I
think he felt that I was doing something that he felt some kind of
kinship to in terms of being a bit of an outsider, a bit of a thorn in
the side of the government.

I know that he and his wife, Liz, saw _All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed_. I think what maybe resonated with them—without speaking
for them, which makes me a little bit nervous—is that it’s a
portrait of Nan but also a larger critique of social structures and
systems. And this is what I’m trying to do in all my films. I’m
not interested in making biopics, but I do tell stories about
individuals who are confronting power structures.

DID YOU GO INTO THE FILM WITH A CLEAR SENSE OF THE STORY YOU WANTED TO
TELL? 

From the very beginning, we were interested in Hersh’s reporting,
but also in the patterns we could see across half a century, and
particularly around atrocities, cover-ups, impunity, and the role of
investigative journalism in circumventing that cycle.

I think one of the reasons why we made this film was because we felt
there’s a crisis in investigative journalism, because it’s hard,
it’s costly, often comes with legal threats, and often takes a lot
of time, and that’s harder to do if you don’t have the
architecture to support it. 

DID SY HAVE VETO POWER? 

Sy didn’t ask for editorial control, but we did update him to make
sure that we weren’t missing things. But he wasn’t difficult. Once
he had finally relented to be part of this project, he was just all
in. 

HOW DID YOU DECIDE WHEN TO GET PERSONAL? 

I was guided by a few things. One was what informed his reporting and
what was his motivation, and that’s what we definitely felt about
his growing up in Chicago, with his parents being immigrants coming
from Eastern Europe, the silence in the house, his dad dies young, and
he’s asked to take over the family’s dry-cleaning shop, and nobody
was giving him opportunities. And then he sort of stumbled into
journalism and found his passion and his love for truth-telling. And
so of course, that needed to be in the film. But as I mentioned, I’m
definitely very anti-biopic, and I’m also very anti-experts. The
people we talked to had to have direct knowledge of the reporting,
like Amy Davidson Sorkin, who was his editor at _The_ _New Yorker _on
Abu Ghraib. 

THERE’S A LOT OF TALK THESE DAYS ABOUT BIAS IN THE MEDIA AND HOW
JOURNALISTS NEED TO BE NEUTRAL. CAN YOU DO INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
FROM A POSITION OF NEUTRALITY? 

I absolutely believe in certain principles in journalism, like that it
should be fact-driven and it should be interrogating power, disclosing
any conflicts of interest, if they exist. But I also think that we
need to use words to describe what’s happening, and so going back to
the Bush era, when news organizations didn’t use the word torture to
describe torture, that is lying. It’s not a neutral position, it’s
a position that is aligning with the nation-state and asking the press
to capitulate to whatever that agenda is. And I think that that’s
really dangerous, because you lose trust. So if we’re talking about
what’s happening in Gaza, I think we have to use the word
“genocide,” because if you look at the evidence of what’s there,
that’s what we’re seeing. I don’t think that that’s biased.
That is looking at two years of dropping American-taxpayer-funded
bombs on a population.

What’s interesting about Sy’s body of work and his career is that
his big stories are evidentiary. They present evidence that shows
atrocities. We’re talking about the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib
torture, CIA surveillance on protest movements or involvement in Chile
and coups all over the world. In his best stories, he delivers the
facts. But he’s never been quiet about his worldview and saying that
he was against the Vietnam War and that it was a catastrophe.

I’M SURE SOME PEOPLE COULD WATCH _COVER-UP_ AND SAY, CLEARLY,
YOU’RE NOT NEUTRAL. WHILE NOT A HAGIOGRAPHY, THE FILM CLEARLY
CELEBRATES HERSH’S ACHIEVEMENTS. I CAN IMAGINE SOMEONE ELSE DOING A
FILM ABOUT SY WHERE HE’S THIS MUCKRAKER WHO’S OUT TO MAKE AMERICA
LOOK BAD. 

One of the things that speaks most highly about Sy’s body of work is
that regardless of what administration has been in power, he’s
gotten under their skin. He went after JFK, he went after Johnson, he
went after Nixon, he went after Reagan, Carter, Obama, Biden, and now
Trump. I believe in that kind of equal-opportunity adversarial
journalism. 

And about the hagiography thing you raised: it was important in the
film to also include times when Sy got it wrong. Because we always
felt like it was our job to talk about the times when he got it wrong
or got played or got too close to power. And those mistakes happen in
the field of journalism. Probably Mark and I had more of an obligation
than most to ask about some of the stories where he made mistakes,
because we knew him well and felt close to his body of work. 

WAS SY RELUCTANT TO DISCUSS HIS MISTAKES?

He didn’t exactly welcome it, but he was fine. I mean, ultimately,
he would have had zero respect for us if we didn’t, which doesn’t
mean that those were his favorite days. 

DO YOU THINK IT’S BECOME MORE DIFFICULT TO GET THE TRUTH OUT IN THIS
AGE OF EXTREME POLARIZATION? PART OF ME EVEN WONDERS WHETHER A MY
LAI–STYLE REPORT PUBLISHED TODAY WOULD HAVE THE SORT OF IMPACT IT
DID FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

I refuse the notion that we’re in a post-fact world. I believe that
people are very aware of if they can’t pay rent or afford healthcare
or education for their kids. Those are facts that people understand.
Yes, some trust has been eroded. And I think it’s been eroded by the
public being lied to by our governments and by the press sometimes.
But I’m not willing to concede that we shouldn’t care about
what’s happening in the world, or that people don’t care. I mean,
journalists in Gaza are dying every day to get out information about
what’s happening. I think they are reaching the public. Whether or
not they’re actually causing governments to change is the real
problem.

DO YOU CONSIDER _COVER-UP_ A HOPEFUL FILM? 

I don’t know if “hope” is the right word. You know, all of my
films have protagonists that are really getting under the skin of
power, whether that’s government or corporate power. And that offers
the idea that it’s possible that an individual or small group of
people can change how we understand the world. That’s a powerful
message when people are feeling a lot of despair.

_A.J. Goldmann is an essayist, critic, and reporter based in Munich._

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* Laura Poitras
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* Seymour Hersh
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* documentary
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* Journalism
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* My Lai Massacre
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* Abu Ghraib
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