It's always like that, PAO protectiveness plus the educational agenda, making each scientist give a mini-tutorial in her area of expertise. The journalists who cover this stuff know to filter out the fluff and report the grist.

I'm confident too that there's life somewhere on Mars, and elsewhere in the universe. Mars is too big a petri dish to not have provided shelter to some ambitious organic molecules, somewhere, some time. And for the universe in general, from first principles it just seems inevitable that physics begets chemistry begets biology. Life happens. It doesn't actually have a choice.