Seymour Hersch is one of the most important journalists of the last century, and he makes a compelling subject in the new Netflix documentary Cover-Up – so much so that the show is currently sitting with a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics.
Hersch broke some of the biggest stories of his era including the horrific massacre at My Lai and the equally horrific abuses of Abu Grahib, and this documentary was described by The Guardian as “a wry, undaunted and absolutely scathing guide through 60-plus years of US government abuses”. It’s also a testament to the power of dogged, determined journalism.
What the reviews say about Cover-Up
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The Observer said that the film “is a suitably prickly tribute to a remarkable investigative journalist, the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh. Fractious, questioning, curious, it’s also a film about journalism itself, and the kind of principled, tenacious investigations that make history and shape policy.” It’s “a compelling and inspiring portrait of a one-off.”
Writing in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw said that “From My Lai onwards, the authorities’ MO and Hersh’s MO are pretty plain. The government will deny and stonewall, until faced with something flagrant and undeniable, when it will claim that it’s a one-off and a bad apple. But Hersh tends to see that these aren’t single, shocking events; it’s just the only time you’ve become aware of one. With an old-fashioned reporter’s dogged “shoe leather” instincts, Hersh goes to see the people involved, talks to them, spends time on a story, and doesn’t take no for an answer.”
That doesn’t mean this is a hagiography that paints Hersch as flawless. As Catherine Wheatley writes in Sight and Sound, Hersch is “a spiky, evasive subject, who protests (perhaps a little too much) that he doesn’t like talking about himself.” But “For all his combativeness (colleagues describe a volatile man, prone to screaming and threats) Hersh has a certain charm… one can only stand in awe of his dogged determination to reveal a history that is, as he remarks with typical understatement, ‘so hard to write’.”
Cover-Up is streaming on Netflix now.
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