Cover-Up

For six decades, Seymour Hersh made powerful people sweat. The Pulitzer-winning journalist built his career exposing what governments desperately wanted buried.

At 88, Hersh let Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras inside his archive—7,000 files, notes, recordings covering My Lai massacre, secret Cambodia bombings, CIA domestic spying, Watergate, Abu Ghraib. The film reveals what investigative journalism actually looks like: not glamorous detective work but painstaking pursuit of a single name until it cracks open a scandal. Hersh is cranky, relentless and protective of sources.

A masterclass in the craft that keeps democracy honest, and a disturbing pattern across administrations: wrongdoing exposed, brief outrage, then impunity. Why journalists matter.