They are clearly in an unenviable position but I think they would have come off better with a more honest, direct acknowledgement of the failure of a tertiary objective, rather than that "oh noes, might derail the emotive hype-train, let's awkwardly pretend we don't know what happened and just hope the audience forgets", which is fairly patronizing and not particularly effective at achieving its intended goal. An awkward, ineffective cover-up is worse than just telling the truth and moving on.
