San Francisco Frontiers - Seymour Hersh makes reluctant subject of new documentary

Co-directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, "Cover-Up" debuted at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, revealing both 88-year-old Hersh's twinkly charm and his frequently spiky character.

"This is becoming less and less fun. I'd like to quit," Hersh tells Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus at one point in the documentary, regretting his decision to sit for the wide-ranging 117-minute film.

"I was very happy not talking about myself, very happy."

Hersh opens the door slightly on his life, with viewers learning about his sometimes tough childhood in Chicago as the son of East European Jewish exiles in a family he paints as cold, closed and intellectually barren.

"I lived on books. Books taught me how to think," he says.

The former Associated Press, The New York Times and New Yorker reporter is guarded when talking about his wife of 60 years, Elizabeth, a psychoanalyst who serves as his stabilising force.

"I despair a lot, so I was very happy to marry her," he reveals.

- 'Prickliness' -

While ill-at-ease being the focus of the story, Hersh comes to life while discussing his canon of work, spanning world-shaking scoops on American military atrocities in My Lai, Vietnam, as well as abuses in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by US troops in 2004.

There are occasional flashes of an arrogance that has made him a divisive character among his peers -- and are perhaps to blame for some of the errors that have dented his reputation in recent years.

"We wanted to capture his resistance, his humour, his prickliness and his protectiveness of his sources," Poitras, who first approached Hersh 20 years ago about a film, told AFP in an interview.

"I think his reservation was that he's not the story. The story is his journalism."

The maker of "Citizenfour" about whistleblower Edward Snowden and "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" about artist Nan Goldin stressed that Hersh's story makes a wider point about the media as well as American power.

"It gives us that historical lens of half a century of US abuses of power, and then also journalism and its role over time," Poitras said.

"The government, with its military, commits a crime, lies about it, Sy (Hersh) uncovers it and they lie through their teeth, and nobody is held accountable.

"There are cycles of impunity and I think these cycles of impunity without repercussions lead us to where we are today."

- Questioning -

A relentless and still-energetic investigator, Hersh continues to work today, migrating much of his work onto subscription-based online blogging site Substack.

One recent scoop -- that US President Donald Trump had decided to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22 -- was largely overlooked by the rest of the media, however, underlining Hersh's late-career credibility problems.

"Cover-Up" briefly addresses Hersh's reporting, which has cast doubt on Syrian President Bashar al Assad's use of chemical weapons against his own people and his allegations that the US was responsible for blowing up the Russian pipeline Nord Stream 2 in 2022.

Criminal and United Nations investigations, as well as other media probes, have undermined both of those assertions.

"It's a film about journalism, so we had to ask the questions that you would ask or that he would ask," Poitras told AFP.

She added that she didn't see her job as vetting all of his work.

Hersh admits to making mistakes but defends his use of anonymous and sometimes single sources to underpin his revelations.

His current target is Donald Trump.

"This is a man who wants to be here for life... My belief is that's his absolute sole mission. He wants to not have another election," Hersh said on Friday.

"I don't have the kind of access to him but I'm working on it. This is a bad time for America."

C.Diaz--SFF