I couldn’t disagree more. It was a public service that the Austin American-Statesman finally foiled the attempted cover-up of the footage.

Whoopi Goldberg is extremely angry at the Austin American-Statesman for releasing the video of the Uvalde police officers standing down for 77 minutes, calling it "indefensible."

"Shame on — I know it doesn't mean anything coming from me [spits], but shame on you!" pic.twitter.com/tZyjKa8CL8

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 13, 2022

If Uvalde city government and Texas police had been forthcoming and transparent since the shooting then I might agree that it was bad form for the AAS to jump the gun by posting the clip before authorities were ready to release it. But they haven’t. As recently as last week, one Texas state rep wrote to the state’s Department of Public Safety requesting that the surveillance video be published. We agree that it should be, DPS replied — but our hands are tied. The district attorney of Uvalde County says no.

Yesterday, I requested a video (no audio) be made available as part of our preliminary report to allow people to see for themselves. It contains no imagery of victims or footage of violence. Today, we received this response. pic.twitter.com/xCR63uR7qJ

— Dustin Burrows (@Burrows4TX) July 8, 2022

What about the timing, though? Couldn’t the AAS have simply waited and then published whatever is shown to Uvalde parents this coming weekend?

The problem with that theory is that we don’t know what will or won’t be shown to the parents during their private screening. Karen wrote earlier about the outrage displayed by city officials at last night’s Uvalde city council meeting that the video was leaked early, with one calling it “chickensh*t.” As you’ll see, one resident rightly retorted that they should care more about chickensh*t cops than about the press: “Y’all are attacking the media. Y’all should attack the cops who did nothing.” The powers that be there continue to have strange priorities in what offends them and what doesn’t. The key bit, though, is what the “chickensh*t” official says about the upcoming screening for parents: “That part of that video was not supposed to be in what they’re doing on Sunday.”

"Rather than attacking the media, y'all should attack those cops."

Uvalde residents react after the mayor and a city council member called journalists "chickenshit" for releasing security camera footage from Robb Elementary. (h/t @ahylton26) pic.twitter.com/rJh80fseYI

— Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) July 12, 2022

Maybe he means that the video the parents will see won’t have audio of the gunshots and/or won’t show the shooter entering the building, to spare them from having to see him. (The AAS’s version edited out the screams of the children but not the sound of the shots.) But why would we trust any Uvalde official, cop or otherwise, at this point not to bowdlerize the footage in order to make it look less damaging to the cops? They’ve delayed the release of the video for nearly two months. They provided false information to DPS in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. They’ve reportedly harassed parents who spoke up about the police response.

There’s no reason to trust these people at this point, which is why the clip leaked in the first place, I assume. Even those on the inside of the city’s response don’t trust their colleagues to be on the up and up about the footage that’s released. If anything, including the sound of the gunshots in the AAS edit was important in that it prevents the city from lying about the number and timing of those shots.

The Statesman’s editor explained their decision to publish the clip in a statement yesterday afternoon. Makes sense to me:

We are also publishing the entire video for those who want to see what we obtained. In both videos we blurred the identity of a child who exits a bathroom as the shooter approaches the classroom. The child runs back to bathroom to hide and was later rescued. We also have removed the sound of children screaming as the gunman enters the classroom. We consider this too graphic.

We have also chosen to show the face of the gunman as he enters this school. Our news organization guidelines state that we should not glorify these individuals and give them the notoriety that they seek. We chose, in this instance, to show his face to chisel away at any conspiracy that we are hiding something. This last point included much discussion among our senior leaders, our Managing Editor for Standards Michael McCarter, our lead reporter, Tony Plohetski, and his editor, Bob Gee.

It’s 1,000 percent true that if they had obscured the shooter’s face, conspiracy theories would be in full flower today that the “real gunman” was someone else. If you’ve spent five minutes on the Internet, you know.

The one point I’ll concede to Goldberg is that it would have been better if the clip had been held by the AAS until after the parents’ screening rather than springing it on them suddenly by posting it online last night. That was probably a function of the paper suspecting that other outlets also had the clip and would beat them to the punch in publishing it if they didn’t go live first. Even so, though, the AAS took care to edit out the most distressing parts to try to spare people’s feelings. One Uvalde father whose son survived the shooting kept his eye on the ball yesterday when asked about the video’s release, focusing instead on the cops’ hesitancy: “It’s like PTSD. You see ’em and you just want to go after them, you know? Anger. Rage. They’re just cowards. They need to resign.”

I’ll leave you with Whoopi insisting that we didn’t really need to see the footage since we already knew that the cops did nothing. Wrong again. To repeat what I said last night: Nothing quite drives home the total dereliction of duty by police on the scene like seeing it play out with your own eyes.

Goldberg concludes the convo by arguing we didn’t need to see this new video since “We [already] knew they didn’t run in there. We knew that they were bull — that they were not telling the truth from the giddy-up.”
She was disgusted with the paper not telling the parents first. pic.twitter.com/VeIUcE64Ie

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 13, 2022