LIVE, LEARN, & LOVE #2

LIVE, LEARN, & LOVE

Do you take delight in watching films or listening to pop music? For English learners, movies, songs, and books are one of the most wonderful sources to explore the language! You can indulge in your favorite pastime and still learn some expressions, words of wisdom, and oftentimes good lessons while you’re at it.

 

# 2. “Cover-up” (2025 Documentary Film)

1.   Journalist Seymour Hersh said “My job as the news reporter is to find out secrets and facts if that is what the issue is. Then we publish it, knowing that we’re violating the rules and the laws of national security and breaking the top-secret information above top secret because we think there is an outstanding reason. We take the story here of officials with responsibilities not conducting their affairs correctly. And that’s the issue I’m trying to make. And there should be any bar on the press, theoretically to publish anything we want, because that happens to be the way that Constitution and the Bill of Rights were setup.”

 

The journalist Hersh views “not conducting one’s affairs/works correctly” as “a failure to do the official’s jobs in the right way they are supposed to do”. He says it is his job to reveal what is going on behind the curtain or under the hat among those high-ranking officials.

 

In the above quote, “bar on the press” refers to government restrictions, censorship, and the general suppression of independent journalism.

 

    2.   Journalist Seymour Hersh said (on the interview about the U.S. government and military deceptions regarding chemical weapons, most notably in two distinct areas: the U.S. Army's own historical chemical and biological weapons programs):

“I don’t care what the army said. I investigated it. It was nerve gas that killed sheep. The army wanted to mess around, but it was nerve gas. Everybody says that off the record. Nobody wants to say the army is lying through their teeth.”

 

“to mess around” has various different meanings (such as “to fool/flirt with someone” or “to waste time or act silly”), but here it refers to the army handling/ interfering with/ or using something in a careless or experimental way.

 

“to lie through one’s teeth” means to tell a lie without remorse. Seymour Hersh wants to point out that although most people involved or noninvolved did not rock the boat by telling the truth, the fact was that the army was telling an obvious, bold, and shameless lie, often with a brazen or unrepentant attitude.

 

·     **  Jean’s small thoughts

As I was watching this documentary film about the difficult journey of the renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, I found myself wondering what it is that keeps a person courageous enough to speak up for the weak in this heartless world full of lies that look or sound more truthful than truths. Would it be a strong conviction in his life? Were they one of those few born with the right mind to bring out dying justice to the world? Maybe or maybe not. What I know for sure is that the voice of truth eventually finds its way out of the lies through these brave people’s pens and mouths called “journalists”.