We went to a private preview of Cover-Up, the new Sy Hersh documentary that comes out next month, and stayed for a Q&A with Laura Poitras, its director. In this ep we give our honest appraisal of the film. And, sadly, it’s not a positive one.
There are a lot of problems with the film — overproduced yet clunky, boring, superficial, intellectually not there at all, very Wikipedia-like, and with an outdated pre-Trump America feel to it. But perhaps its main crime is that it wasted an opportunity to talk to Hersh about the mythology of journalism in America and journalism’s ultimate lack of power. He spent his entire life exposing secrets — the My Lai Massacre, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, torture at Abu Ghraib — and yet in that same span of time, America kept getting worse and more corrupt and unequal and more violent and more unaccountable. We’re at point where journalism doesn’t matter at all. And so what good was all his journalism? Was it just a game? Entertainment? A way to pass the time and make a living? A path to fame? A relief valve for society?
None of the problems with the film are Sy Hersh’s fault. It seems like he actually gets it. The problem is that Laura Poitras is just not that bright.
I guess you could say there is an unintended message in this film and it’s this: Information by itself is not power. You need organization to turn information into power, and journalism by itself does not provide that.
At the end of the ep we discuss a Laura Poitras scandal that few know about. It includes her, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, a very expensive mattress in Berlin, and her documentary Risk.
—Yasha
PS: We discussed the mattress scandal in detail in a previous episode: Triple Threat: Julian Assange.
PPS: We also previously reviewed The Beauty And The Bloodshed, a Laura Poitras doc about Nan Goldin and her fight against the highly respected Sackler family, which is actually quite good.
