On the new documentary “Cover-Up” by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus.
Paweł Mościcki is a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the author of numerous books and a blog: pawelmoscicki.net as well as substack pawelmoscicki.substack.com
Cross-posted from Pawel’s Substack
What is not shown
A documentary film, like any other, consists of what is shown and what is not shown. The essence of montage is that it selects material, creating connections between different threads on the one hand, and removing those that do not fit into the main narrative on the other. As long as the relationship between these two dimensions is reasonably balanced, we as viewers should not feel that we are being deceived or manipulated. There is no film without omissions, selectivity, or bias. Honesty is a matter of proportion.
Laura Poitras often shows in her films what is not shown elsewhere. What is not in the spotlight of either the big film studios or the corporate media. She is primarily interested in what the power – both in politics and in the media – hide from us. This makes her films a kind of counter-montage, often bringing back into the picture things that we are not allowed to see. Poitras chooses characters who explore forgotten areas of politics, secret operations, and machinations that are meant to remain in the shadows. After Citizenfour (2014), which featured Edward Snowden, and Risk (2016), which focused on Julian Assange, it was time for another such protagonist. In her latest film, Cover-Up, Laura Poitras (together with Mark Obenhaus) meets Seymour Hersh, a giant of investigative journalism and one of the most important civic voices in the US.
It is difficult to count Hersh’s achievements in the field of journalism understood as a practice of civil disobedience, revealing the behind-the-scenes of power, exposing crimes or fraud hidden from the public eye. Suffice it to say that he was the first to write about the massacre in the village of My Lai in Vietnam, one of the first to describe the Watergate scandal, and the first to write about the torture carried out in the American prison in Abu Ghraib. However, the creators of Cover-Up face a real challenge here. They want to put someone in the spotlight who clearly does not want to be there. Hersh is a figure who fits perfectly into old movies glorifying heroes fighting for freedom of speech. Neurotic to the point of exaggeration, suspicious of external attempts to interfere with his contacts, guarding both his professional secrets and his own comfort of remaining in the shadow of the stories he describes.
This attitude is characterized by a fundamental modesty that is almost absent in this environment. Hersh manifests his ethos through his annoyance with politicians and editors, his relentlessness in pursuing issues that he has been repeatedly advised against, rather than through touching declarations to the camera. In this sense, he is completely unsuitable as the subject of a documentary film. He is fascinating, somewhat in spite of himself and the filmmakers’ intentions. That is why the film reaches its climax when Hersh decides to break off cooperation and stop filming. For a moment, it seems that the best ending for such a film would be the protagonist’s spectacular breakaway from the leash.
The general cover-up scheme
Almost half of the film is devoted to Hersh’s most famous, even iconic work, the My Lai massacre. I don’t know if the choice of this particular topic was dictated by the protagonist’s great care to keep the filmmakers away from his informants, contacts, and sources, but it is difficult to rule out this possibility. Sometimes, however, one gets the impression that the level of detail is excessive, and the film about a journalist known for uncovering many uncomfortable topics becomes a monograph on the violence of the Marines in Vietnam.
On the other hand, Poitras and Obenhaus manage to reconstruct, step by step, the pattern of the titular “cover-up.” First, the government commits a crime, then hides it from the public, and when people who want to share uncomfortable knowledge come forward, they are immediately disciplined, intimidated, or publicly discredited. Officials will keep their mouths shut, and other media outlets will suddenly start pumping stories about the patriotism of soldiers into the public consciousness, until finally, even those officially accused of war crimes will have more or less metaphorical monuments erected in their honor.
It is important to recognize this pattern in order to understand how much strength and endurance it takes to swim against the tide of the dominant consensus guarded by the most important state and capital institutions. They defend interests against which individual journalists or even entire press titles seem like small dogs barking at a column of tanks. These institution will only agree to reveal the truth years later, when it no longer interferes with anyone’s plans.
Co-opting the media
The decision to focus viewers’ attention on the story of My Lai, regardless of what dictated it, significantly limits its critical power. It overshadows or weakens the impact not so much of other topics as of the most important topic, which is not actually addressed in the documentary. It boils down to the question: why is Sy Hersh, that Sy Hersh!, the famous journalist known for upsetting the authorities, writing on Substack today? Why is there no place for him in any key press title, or even in independent or alternative titles? What has happened to the media space in the US that authors with such achievements (because this is not a problem of one person) have virtually no place in it?
Poitras and Obenhaus do not address this issue, thus risking creating a eulogy for journalism at a time when it deserves only an epitaph. Or a journalistic investigation, as inquisitive as Hersh’s, into its systematic murder. Meanwhile, watching the film, one gets the impression that we are still living in the years when the secrets of Vietnam were uncovered.
But it is completely different. Today, journalism, including investigative journalism, has become licensed, affiliated, and integrated with the apparatus of state repression and surveillance. If it keeps an eye on politicians, it is because it essentially favors their political competitors and will fall silent as soon as they take power. Above all, however, it has completely surrendered to the most enduring and often covert instruments of power that were exposed by the previous heroes of Poitras’ films, Snowden and Assange. Is it not a symbol of these changing times that The Guardian, the newspaper that first revealed the materials collected by Snowden, participated in the media smear campaign against the head of Wikileaks only few years later?
Today, we live in an era of fakes. The apparatus of power has not only decided to break Assange, but also to create its own Wikileaks. One such outlet is Bellingcat, which sells the aura of the “activist” investigations while in fact doing the job that an intelligence officer would not be ashamed of. In this way, with money from the US embassy or the NED, it allows journalists to think they are the new Assange, even though they are in fact working for those who kept him in prison.
One of the simplest operations in neutralizing the critical and civic power of journalism is a simple change of focus. Yes, we are now exposing the secrets of those in power, but not in our own country. We are directing our attention to other countries, especially those that our government considers worthy of scrutiny. And for this noble cause, all means will be found, rewards will be showered, contracts will be signed, books will be published. World fame is awaiting. The problem is that such journalism is not capable of upholding democratic standards of public opinion. Today, journalists have become gatekeepers of the official narrative, rather than people who challenge it in search of hidden transgressions.
What was once a single Mockingbird operation has now turned into an entire system of corporate media that has become perfectly integrated with the world of think tanks, finantial capital, tech giants, weapons manufacturers, etc.. In many cases, the very act of covering a story has become indistinguishable from covering it up. And Poitras and Obenhaus’s film, for all its merits, fails to touch on this dramatic transformation.
The absence of the topic of the co-optation of journalism means that we are unable to appreciate not only Hersh’s current activities, but also those of other authors who, despite everything, are trying to uphold the mission of the profession. They are confronted not only with a conspiracy of silence surrounding the secrets of power, but also with perfectly orchestrated smear campaigns targeting anyone who does not comply.
What is more, by drawing attention to this process, one could also attempt to trace the genealogy of the motif of “foreign influence,” which the corporate media pursue with the same vehemence with which they avoid talking about the actual extent of the power that controls them.
After all, it is precisely those who, like Hersh, Chris Hedges, Craig Murray, and John Pilger, as well as younger authors such as Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté (and luckily many others), are today public enemies in these circles precisely because they have not succumbed to conformism. And because there is no longer any room for internal criticism in the Western media, these journalists are often held accountable for allegedly representing foreign influences, hostile narratives, or other hastily concocted problems. This is the best evidence of the decline of the spirit of deliberation and the shrinking of the public space for debate to the size of a bunker. Today, anyone who is not a participant in the system of the cover-up becomes the subject of vivisection, hostile retouching designed to destroy their reputation.
Belated explosions of truth
In Poitras and Obenhaus’s film, which devotes a full hour to the My Lai massacre, Hersh’s article on the bombing of Nord Stream 2 is given barely a few minutes. And these are the ones in which the filmmakers seem a little embarrassed to be dealing with it at all. Perhaps they were influenced by Hersh’s own caution and secrecy, who knows? Yet it is the article on this subject that the corporate media, which once praised his achievements, decided to portray the hero of Cover-Up as a madman or a fraud.
At the same time, however, it is a fundamental issue—a potential attack on the economic infrastructure of a NATO country, state economic terrorism, the largest methane leak in history, etc.—whose far-reaching consequences perhaps surpass anything Hersh has written about so far. We should demand to know what happened much more than celebrate even the greatest journalistic achievements of several decades ago. Especially since no one else will take this seriously, as evidenced by many well-known press titles.
Siegfried Kracauer wrote in the 1920s about the vicissitudes of such delayed curiosity. “It is dangerous to depict contemporary events, because it can quickly and easily turn the rebellious masses against powerful institutions; filmmakers prefer to point their cameras at the Middle Ages, which the audience will perceive as harmless and uplifting. The more distant the historical period in which the action is set, the more daring filmmakers become. They will risk depicting a successful revolution in historical costumes, just so that people will forget about contemporary revolutions; they will gladly satisfy the general need for justice by filming ancient struggles for freedom”. I am afraid that this text is the harshest criticism that can be directed at Cover-Up. It would be interesting to hear the filmmakers’ response to such objections.
The general situation in our information sphere means that we no longer have time to wait for the truth to explode in a few decades. Especially since, if the My Lai massacre teaches us anything today besides history, it is that between “now,” when we decide not to fight for the truth, and “sometime in the future,” when it will be possible to talk about it, we are guaranteed a long period of undeserved suffering, obscene lies, and shameless acts of cover-up. And after those years, those who deserved justicewill no longer be among us. Neither will we, for that matter.
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