When, in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg wanted to publicize the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, aka the Pentagon Papers, he took it to the New York Times that, after long discussions about potential legal liability, began publishing the 47-volume, 7,000-page cache of government documents and analysis. Those documents and the paper’s decision to publish them remain a landmark in (a) the people’s right to know what our government is doing, even when that government doesn’t want us to, (b) our trust in the mainstream media and (c) the concomitant decline in our trust in government.
That's an excellent analogy. I should have thought of it myself. After all, I'm old enough to remember.