In 'Cover-Up,' Laura Poitras Investigates Seymour Hersh

The filmmaker on her twenty-year project, the “crisis” in investigative journalism, and how truth-telling can still change the world.

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.