Cover-Up Review | Laura Poitras’ Documentary Is A Laser Blast Between Journalism And Power

In the searing Cover-Up, Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus trace an individual resisting the American establishment, its sanctified version crumbling under scrutiny. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh is at once the hero here and purveyor of bitter truths. Screened at the ongoing Palm Springs Film Festival 2026, Cover-Up is in kinship with the particular documentary vein the filmmakers are known for. Poitras’ follow-up to her 2022 Golden Lion-winning film, All The Beauty and The Bloodshed, is a reprised confrontation. Just as Poitras amplified Nan Goldin’s takedown of pharma companies and their bloodied patronized museums, she demonstrates Hersh’s skewering of ugly affiliations between the Pentagon and journalists cozying up to power.

The documentary cracks through the edifice of liberal American democracy. Hersh calls out the entire apparatus. Neither does he spare his own community of press, who faithfully reproduce the official telling/White House-backed in reports. Any claims of independent, agenda-free journalism are promptly shut down. Where’s the effort to march the extra mile, the resolve to peek through the holes? Is it even journalism when just a certain authority-friendly account gets around, unchallenged and unverified? Hersh speaks to the greatest prevailing danger—self-censorship by the press

Expectedly, Cover-Up devotes a bulk to Hersh’s ground-breaking expose of the US Army’s 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai. The reports had been initially rejected as fallacious and propaganda, until the truth became inevitable. Hersh grew indispensable to the alarmed public realization that the military couldn’t be relied on. He dug up dirt on CIA, landed scoops on its spying on civilians. Hersh himself has courted the tail end. Just when he was thriving in The New York Times, he saw through corporate malfeasance. He made connections where nobody dared. But he was clearly shown the limits. To do his job would also drag the Times through muck, since a board member was complicit. Hersh quit, pulled far more intensely by duty than greed. He pursues the thread, rambling beyond caution. Here’s an individual not curtailed by structural compromises and diktats.

Hersh is conscientious, but not without flaws. The documentary does prop him up as being the noble, unflappable vanguard of integrity, yet also critically suggests how he too might stretch assumptions. How can stories be bent to favor a reporter’s whims, what easily sits with them? Hersh becomes victim to his own hubris. His journalistic drive pushes aside considerations of his own fallibility. For all his earnest cementing of sources and cross-checking, it too falls prey to personal bias. It’s only human to err, and the film only winks at few of Hersh’s hasty misjudgements. He quickly diverts from his oversight regarding the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Correspondence between JFK and Marilyn Monroe that he published—which were later dismissed as forgeries—gets passing attention. We can’t help but ponder how much being provocative played into his latter investigations.

This towering portrait of a man who rose without fear of institutions might strike as too sincere. It’s the kind that normally translates to dull, uninspired cinema. There are paradoxes here. Early in the film, Hersh tells the filmmakers he barely trusts them. This relationship stays incipient, nudged to be swatted aside. However, Poitras and Obenhaus harness Hersh’s righteous instincts into an unflinching lesson contemporary media should heed. At an age when conscience and ethics are bankrupt, Hersh insists we clutch tight the corrupt soul of our nations and keep it from going unsalvageable. Just because things are on a steep decline doesn’t necessitate absolute defeat. We must not cede the continuous struggle for truth and justice. Hersh rallies for accountability, tearing down the comfortable veil of safe narratives around power and citizenship.

Poitras and Obenhaus are traversing vast ground, hacking through decades of Hersh’s rebellious career. A mission like this is bound to have nagging erasures, oversights and areas demanding sharper highlighting. Sans the safety net of the Times, how did Hersh get back on his feet? Cover-Up flashes through these transitions rather briskly, flattening out difference and intensity among spells of activity. Darting silent archival footage on his beaver-minded younger self is more immediately persuasive than entire verbal stretches. We also wonder how his defining values got instilled so unshakably. A sense of his foundation, his toughening conviction comes off as pat and neatly formed. Principles have their roots somewhere; sticking them through political isolation calls for great certainty. Where’s the growth and trajectory? The documentary tends to skate through high points, amping up drama and terror before slumping into a predictable, unjagged character study. When a regime consolidates its grip, even dissidents fall in line. Even now at 88, Hersh stands out, dogged and undeterred. Increasingly, Cover-Up gets too wide, its enquiry diminishing in specificity. Nonetheless, there’s impassioned force here, making it essential viewing.

Cover-Up screened at the Palm Springs Film Festival 2026