‘He’s a son of a bitch – but he’s usually right’: Why did Seymour Hersh leave the film about his stunning scandal? | film

HeyOne morning last month, Seymour Hersh set out to buy a newspaper. The reporter walked for 30 minutes, covering six blocks of the Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and saw no sign of life. There are no newsstands on street corners selling magazines and daily newspapers. There is no self-service kiosk where you can insert a dollar and pull out a bill. “Finally, I found a drugstore that had two copies of the New York Times in the back,” Hirsch recalls. He bought one for himself. He couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had bought the second one.

Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1937, the year the Hindenburg exploded and aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. This makes him a man of hot metal, an old media sailor, with metaphorical newsprint on his fingers and a scrapbook that reads like an index of American adventure. Hirsch has been a staff writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He told broken stories about Vietnam, Watergate, Gaza and Ukraine. But the free press is in crisis, newspapers are in flux, and investigative journalism may face its own deadline. “I don’t think I can do now what I did 30, 40 or 50 years ago,” says the 88-year-old. “The outlets are not there. The money is not there. So I don’t know where we all are now.”

Cover-Up, a new documentary from Laura Poitras and Mark Oppenhaus, reminds us of where he was, turning back the clock to chart Hersh’s wild and difficult path through American journalism. It’s a film that gives us the journalist’s greatest hits, with particular emphasis on his exposes of the 1968 My Lai massacre of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by US Army soldiers, and the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, while also acknowledging his occasional mistakes and controversial reliance on unnamed individual sources.

Along the way, the film paints a vivid portrait of Hersh himself: a prickly hothead who makes enemies in the editorial office and the Oval Office alike. “This Seymour Hersh is a son of a bitch, probably a Communist agent,” President Nixon told Kissinger on a tape discovered at the White House. “But he’s usually right,” he adds reluctantly.

Initially, Hirsch wasn’t interested in participating in the documentary. He says Poitras stalked him for years. He’s still not sure why he changed his mind. Hirsch has collaborated with Oppenhaus several times in the past. But Poitras was a different kind of director, and he approached it from troubling new angles. “Mark and I, when we interview people, we just ask them what happened. Laura asks me: ‘How did you feel?’” he cringes at the memory. “That’s not a man’s question. This is more psychoanalysis. “

Filming was a chore and he became impatient. Hirsch hated letting cameras intrude into his office, which was filled with legal notebooks and Rolodexes. He guarded his contact list like a dragon guarding his treasure. It was only a matter of time before his distrust boiled over and he threatened to quit film altogether.

Poitras won an Oscar for her documentary Citizenfour about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose revelations were published in The Guardian. Her previous picture, “All Beauty and Bloodshed,” by artist and activist Nan Goldin, won the Golden Lion of Venice. So accustomed to working with volatile subjects is she that she enjoys the drama it brings. Her main thought, when Hirsch briefly abandoned the project, was to feel relieved that he had done so thoughtfully on camera.

“Say has a pattern of quitting,” Poitras told me. “He left the New York Times, for example. So we knew it wasn’t out of the question that he would leave the film. It could happen. But I thought he was invested, I thought we’d get through it. His anger was mostly directed at me. We hit a little bump. He left the film. But 24 hours later he came back.”

The film is about Hirsch but it is also about journalism. It shows the inherent contradictions of news media and its flawed business model. The cover-up suggests that the best investigative reporters are natural outsiders and rarely stay long within risk-averse organizations. Editors and management may claim they want good stories, but they actually fear them, because scoops tend to cause problems and involve a lot of fighting. Interestingly, the film includes archival footage of Hirsch speaking on stage in the 1970s. He says: “What we have here in America is not censorship as much as it is self-censorship by the press.”

If that was true then, it’s doubly true today, Poitras says. She is alarmed not only by Trump’s authoritarian campaign to stifle a free press, but also by the fervor with which many media giants have already upended. Two major networks — ABC and CBS — recently agreed to reach settlements with Trump rather than argue the case in court. The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, ordered the paper to focus less on politics and more on promoting “personal freedoms and free markets.”

Poitras says the situation is dangerous. “What we’re seeing in the United States is the preemptive capitulation of institutions to avoid a legal battle they would have won. That’s shameful. I don’t know how they explain that to themselves. It’s the worst precedent you could set.” She shakes her head. “If institutions are not willing to support aggressive reporting, it is dangerous. We all suffer.”

Times are tough, agrees Oppenhaus, co-director of Cover-Up. The First Amendment is under siege daily. It is the closest to McCarthyism, the era of repression and persecution of the 1950s, that he has ever seen. Add to this the broader issue of an increasingly fragmented media landscape, and it could amount to a perfect storm.

“There are no gatekeepers anymore,” says Oppenhaus. “So-called legacy media is very fragmented. Without that center — that base — it’s difficult for good journalism to penetrate, which means people increasingly rely on unreliable sources. And it bothers me deeply that Cy Hirsch today might be writing on Substack or some other platform — and you’ll never hear about them unless the algorithm connects you to their work.”

As it happens, Hirsch writes on Substack. The platform suits him because he has a large number of dedicated readers who would gladly pay for his work; Also because it allows him to cover the stories he wants, away from editorial interference. “Substack is self-publishing,” Hirsch explains. “So it’s a subculture. It works financially. It’s a way to live life, and I’m not knocking on the door. But it’s not like writing for the New York Times.” He doesn’t miss office politics, company culture, and what he sees as the cowardice and conformism of senior editors. But what he misses is the excitement of performing on the big stage.

If the cover-up has shown us anything, it is that the role of the journalist has always been absurd. It is an arduous and constant struggle, in which every victory runs the risk of being immediately undone. Hersh’s presentation of the My Lai massacre, for example, refuted the US military’s official version of events and helped turn public opinion against the war in Vietnam. But it led to the conviction of only one of the 26 soldiers involved, Lieutenant William Calley, whose prison sentence was later commuted by Nixon.

One of the rewards of a six-decade career is that it gave Hirsch a sense of perspective. He knows that investigative reporting is often thankless and often unproductive. But it still speaks truth to power, and remains a vital driver of social change. “The principle of journalism is incredible,” he says. “Just imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t have the press that we had, and we still have today. I don’t like what’s happening in the United States. I don’t like kowtowing to Trump. But there’s still the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times is still a good newspaper. The Los Angeles Times used to be, but now it’s owned by a Trump supporter.” He refers to Patrick Soon-Shiong. “But journalism is important,” he adds, collecting himself. “it’s necessary.”

In September, Hirsch attended the premiere of Cover-Up at the Venice Film Festival. The public response was so overwhelming, Poitras says, that it moved the journalist to tears. “He was always a lone wolf troublemaker,” she explains. “So maybe he wasn’t used to being acknowledged and celebrated. I don’t think he was ready for it. He was very emotional. He was crying.”

Hirsch tells a different story. He claims he was shocked by the public’s reaction. He adds that the audience did not understand the film’s humor, did not laugh at the appropriate moments, and then applauded for an inappropriate amount of time at the end. “I was embarrassed by it,” he says. “I know they like to measure the applause at these festivals, but enough is enough. I was trying to stop that.”

I like the picture of Hirsch standing in the hallway and motioning for people to be quiet. It seems like a master brand for this most critical of clients: a thorn in the side of every great establishment – ​​not shy about crashing parties, even at his own.