Re:The press conferences at NASA
Well, considering the first question journalists ask when NASA organizes a press conference is always "How much is this flight (or experiment) costing?", NO wonder NASA gets tired of the lack of scientific and technical interests of so many of those "accredited" journalists.
The journalists are not there to satisfy any scientific curiosity coming from the public (which they assume it doesn't have, anyway), but to look for problems or controversies even when there are none. That's what NASA is faced with, nowadays and of course, like Phil so eagerly does, it's always easy to blame NASA for this.
Raoul