Reflections on the documentary "Cover Up"
Copied from my review on letterboxd. I have been experimenting with voice to text off late, and so this is fairly raw and unedited. But better this than chatgpt rubbish.
It’s so terrifying to see what’s happening or what’s been happening in the world since the last few centuries and to see these countries perpetuate a crime after crime while proclaiming themselves to be the protectors and representatives of a free word.
This documentary shines its light on one of the people who had a role in exposing a few of these atrocities, and it’s fairly obvious that some of these were not isolated events. Hersh says this line in the documentary where he was nonplussed about why the events of the massacre were kept secret for so long. He says that it could be one of two things - that it was so shocking that people were not able to process the event or that, it was just another day out there.
Then you can also see how establishments like the New York Times have always toed the government line and their corporate interests. This makes these supposedly reputed organisations much more insidious than the daily mails and the murdoch rags of the world.
And in some cases, we can see the nature of the public outrage. In case of the Chaos program, the people were only (temporarily anyway) angry that the same methods which were being employed by the their intelligence agencies against foreign people all the time were also targeted internally, a petty matter of the occasionally transgression of constitutional mandates.
I wonder how investigative journalism of this sort will go forward, especially in the era of artificial intelligence, and I think it’s pointed out in the beginning of the documentary, where he says that this sort of journalism is not possible in these day and age, wherein there is no one paying for this and all good journalism is just lost behind some guy’s substack.
I like how Hersh says that it doesn’t matter whether there’s only one source, or nine.
Towards the end of the documentary, he refers to a culture of enormous violence, which I think not only applicable to one country, but many other communities on this planet.