Announcing it isn't fishy. If they didn't announce it, they'd risk a whistleblower telling the story for them. In fact, the story did break a day before Apple could officially announce it. That may already have hurt them more because they weren't even part of the discussion at that point. What you want is to tell the story on your terms. If someone beats you to it you can't do that.

Unrelated to Apple, but that's one of the big problems with misinformation. You can't get ahead of it because it's all made up.