Laura Poitras on Seymour Hersh: War & Propaganda

In this interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald speaks with Academy Award–winning filmmaker Laura Poitras about her latest documentary on Seymour Hersh — one of the most influential investigative journalists of the past half-century.

From Vietnam to the present, Hersh’s reporting has exposed government secrecy, war crimes, and the structural pressures that shape media narratives. Why do the same patterns of war, propaganda, and official deception seem to repeat themselves? And what role does journalism play in challenging — or reinforcing — power?

This conversation explores the history, the risks, and the unresolved questions surrounding state power and the press.

This video was produced by System Update and published on their YouTube channel on the 21st of January, 2026.

To read the transcript of the interview: Laura Poitras on Seymour Hersh: War & Propaganda

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VIDEO: Laura Poitras on Seymour Hersh: War & Propaganda

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ABOUT GLENN GREENWALD

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, and the author of several bestsellers, including No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (2014) and Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil (2021).  Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America’s top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and a co-founder and former editor at The Intercept, which he left in 2020 to launch his own show System Update on Rumble.

ABOUT LAURA POITRAS

Laura Poitras is an Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist known for films on state power, surveillance, and dissent. Her work includes Citizenfour, which documented Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and Cover Up, a portrait of Seymour Hersh’s reporting on U.S. war crimes. She is also a co-founder of The Intercept and has faced sustained government scrutiny for her reporting. 

Cover Photo: Seymour Hersh – © Giorgio Montersino (2009), via Wikimedia Commons.