Whether or not its a coordinated media blitz or just journalists piggybacking on each other for content I don't know. That it is coming out at the same time new iPhones could go either way.
Things that people are completely missing about this story:
-Big difference between domestic & local law enforcement and NSA/DoD/CIA. Nothing prevents backdooring of a phone or someone spying as the user enters their simple password. Local law enforcement doesn't have these resources and has gotten used to access to all kinds of evidence that never existed. What Apple may or may not have done just pushes the cost up.
-I think Apple is very scared about being locked out of the Chinese market right now. The new iPhones have not been approved yet last I heard. This is a big fucking deal that would wipe out a huge chunk of Apple's market cap. They are not going to budge because some local law enforcement officers claim only child molesters use iPhones.
-Google is in a similar boat except they are already locked out of China, likely will get locked out of Russia soon. They would like to be able to still make money in Brazil and the EU.
-I think it is a good trend for the pushback from tech companies. There is no good answer for international legal compliance for user records. Records should be accessible once an account has been compromised locally, not because any judge in any country on earth can search all of your user data on any user in any other country. Between Dropbox, Dropcam & all of these other cloud services, right now a user has no idea who has access to all of their data all of the time. Time travel back two decades, no one is stealing all of your data over a dial up modem. Nor is a device recording every square foot of where you are at every moment. The tools law enforcement have access to right now are godlike