"Fun" Fact: it's currently the European championships in football (soccer) in Europe (probably the biggest event of the year), so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak this through without too many people noticing.
replies(5):
Quite often a government body has missed some performance targets, suffered cost overruns or has other bad news which they need to announce publicly at some point. But they can choose when the announcement comes out.
Then along comes September 11th 2001, planes crash into the twin towers, and while the towers are still burning government PR teams are rushing out the announcement that they've badly missed their train punctuality targets.
They know the news and social media are going to be full of the big event for days or weeks. By the time things are quiet enough that the newspapers have space to report on train punctuality, the bad figures are old news.
This works equally well with big good-news stories like royal weddings and big sporting events.
The "good day to bury bad news" quote is interesting because someone leaked an e-mail where a government PR boss literally encouraged it. Usually such encouragement would be by telephone or whatsapp to avoid creating a paper trail.