[tnecniv]

This is incredibly common due to multiple levels of media hype. I got interviewed by someone from university PR for a series on what different grad students were working on during my PhD. We had a 30 minute phone call and the result a week later was an article that I was allowed to edit before release. The article was conveyed the most ambitious possible take of my research agenda and had a rather forced narrative relating it to the department beer league softball team I played on for a single season at that point. I could have rewrote the whole thing but it wasn’t factually wrong and I had neither the time nor care to do so.

This didn’t happen to me, but these university press releases then get picked up by science journalists who, maybe with an additional interview, build off it for their own article and hype up the work and narrative even more. It’s like a game of hype telephone.