The fact that the Robb Elementary footage was leaked from an ongoing investigation gives the blame-the-media brigades more fodder for their smarm and their scorn. Officials of any sort hate it when embarrassing material leaks from a black box, and they generally turn their ire on the outlets that have the chutzpah to publish it. By raising a fuss about the provenance of the leaked material and the ostensible impropriety of its publicization, officials often hope to deflect attention away from the substance of the story. Fox News pulls big ratings every night by pursuing this very strategy of deflection.

But the Uvalde City Council ain’t Fox News, and the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE weren’t the ones standing around for an hour while a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two adults inside a classroom that might not have even been locked. These outlets have done a great public service in acquiring and publishing footage that renders transparent the authorities’ opaque narrative of that desperate hour at Robb Elementary. The video clarifies a part of the story about which the authorities have been neither credible nor consistent, a story on which it’s been shown that we cannot trust the authorities’ word. It has immense news value and is of immense public interest—not for what it shows us about the shooter, but for what it shows us about the people who were supposed to confront him.