The 2009 festival keynote speech will be given by Seymour Hersh of the leading American weekly The New Yorker on Saturday 04 April 2009. He first came to prominence with his reports on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969 and more recently broke the news on the treatment by American soldiers of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2004. He is widely considered to have been the most influential investigative journalist in the world over the past 40 years. The subject of his speech will be On how the Bush administration overran the American Constitution with the aid of the American press. This will be the first time that Seymour Hersh has made a public appearance in Italy.