Cover Up, arriving on Netflix on December 26, 2025, is a documentary takes a deliberately restrained approach to the career of Seymour Hersh, one of the most consequential and controversial figures in American investigative journalism. Here is why Hersh’s reporting has repeatedly forced U.S. institutions into defensive silence. Rather than dramatizing these moments, Cover Up examines the method behind them: leaked documents, anonymous sources, and a persistent distrust of official narratives. The result is a film that interrogates not just a journalist’s legacy, but the uneasy mechanics through which power, truth, and accountability collide in the United States.
Cover Up – All the key details
- Title: Cover Up
- Format: Film / Documentary
- Runtime: 2 hours
- Genre: Documentary, Political, Investigative Journalism
- Release date: December 26, 2025
- Directors: Mark Obenhaus, Laura Poitras
- Main subject: Seymour Hersh
- Produced by: Netflix
What Cover Up is about
Cover Up reconstructs, with an almost archival discipline, the major investigations that defined Seymour Hersh’s career. The documentary begins with the moment that changed American journalism in 1969: Hersh’s exposure of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. His reporting revealed that hundreds of Vietnamese civilians had been killed by U.S. soldiers, and that the military had attempted to suppress the truth. From that point forward, Hersh’s professional life unfolded in constant friction with power. Rather than presenting this trajectory as a heroic narrative, Cover Up adopts a deliberately unsentimental approach. Through original articles, declassified documents, interviews, and carefully placed silences, the film outlines a method built on confidential sources, internal leaks, and deep skepticism toward official accounts. There is no manufactured suspense. The tension comes from repetition. The same pattern appears again and again: revelation, denial, retaliation, and gradual erosion of public certainty. Over time, the system becomes more opaque, not less.
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The investigations that shook Washington
A substantial portion of Cover Up focuses on the cases that made Hersh both influential and deeply controversial. From CIA covert operations to secret bombings in Cambodia, and later to the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib, the documentary shows how Hersh repeatedly published stories other outlets considered too dangerous or politically explosive. The film insists on one crucial point: every major scoop came at a cost. Professional isolation, accusations of being unpatriotic, and sustained discrediting campaigns followed many of his investigations.
Cover Up also examines Hersh’s more recent work, including inquiries that divided the journalistic community and raised uncomfortable questions about anonymous sources and evidentiary standards. The documentary does not seek to absolve or condemn. Instead, it reveals how unstable the boundary between truth, credibility, and institutional power has always been, especially when journalism collides with national interest.
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Cover Up – Direction and authorial gaze
The presence of director Laura Poitras is decisive in shaping the film’s tone. Her approach avoids emotional emphasis entirely, favoring a dry, almost clinical visual language. The images never ask for empathy. They create distance. That distance becomes the documentary’s most compelling tool. Meaning emerges not from persuasion, but from the gap between the facts presented and the way they are allowed to stand on their own. Alongside Poitras, Mark Obenhaus contributes a rigorous structure that advances through accumulation and comparison, letting contradictions and blind spots surface without resolving them explicitly. The result is a film that trusts the audience to sit with uncertainty rather than offering moral shortcuts.
Is Cover Up based on a true story?
Yes. Cover Up is entirely based on real events and on the investigative work published by Seymour Hersh throughout his career. The documentary introduces no fictional elements and avoids dramatized reconstructions. Everything shown derives from verified sources, published articles, interviews, and archival material, in line with a strict journalistic approach.
Why watch Cover Up
If you enjoyed Citizenfour or The Post, this documentary sits in the same territory, blending political investigation, power analysis, and a professional portrait of a journalist whose career has been defined by confrontation with authority. This is not comfort viewing. It challenges the viewer to reconsider how truth is produced, resisted, and remembered.
Cover Up release date on streaming
Release date: December 26, 2025.
▶ WATCH ON NETFLIX
