Seymour Hersh Uncovers the Truth in Cover-Up

“This Seymour Hersh is a son of a bitch, probably a communist agent,” President Nixon tells Henry Kissinger on an unearthed White House tape. “But,” he adds grudgingly, “he’s usually right.”

Cover-Up is a 2025 documentary film about the extraordinary 67-year journalism career of Seymour (Sy) Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose unflagging belief that the truth must be revealed and that every lead must be followed are the cornerstones of his work. He is fiercely protective of his sources, though he is not particularly likeable, and we see him getting annoyed by the filmmakers’ questions. Oscar®-winner Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and Emmy®-winner Mark Obenhaus direct the film, which is streaming exclusively on Netflix.

Sy Hersh is most famous for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, and, later, the torture committed by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War.

Hersh explains that the U.S. military in Vietnam used a quota system to show that the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrilla force casualties were greater than American losses. My Lai was a small village when 100 U.S. soldiers, led by Lieutenant William Calley, arrived looking for Viet Cong. They found only women, children, babies, and elderly men, and murdered all 400-500 villagers, claiming they were Viet Cong. High-ranking American military officials knew what happened; it wasn’t an isolated incident. In fact, there was another massacre that day just a few kilometers away. Despite official efforts to cover up the massacre in what was already a very unpopular war at home, Hersh was able to expose the truth. In the end, most officers involved were charged only with “Failure to Report,” and even Calley served just three months in prison and three years of house arrest. One can’t help but notice the similarity to the quotas given to ICE agents and their lack of accountability.

Hersh uncovered the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture when he responded to a source who found the photos of Iraqi prisoners on a computer she had lent to her niece, deployed to Iraq. When asked if the story would have happened if he had not discovered the photos, Hersh said, “No. There wouldn’t have been a story.”

The film also explores Hersh’s investigations into the Watergate Scandal, secret nerve gas production at five U.S. air bases, covert U.S. bombings in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and clandestine CIA activities to overthrow foreign governments and spy on American citizens. Today, as corporate America increasingly controls our news media, Hersh cautions us: “This is a time when journalism needs all the support it can get.”

NOTES

1. Cover-Up, Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, Netflix Studios, 2025, Netflix.