Archaeology Should Resist Newswire Relevance

[redexile]

Well, speaking as an old meeja hoower... It's not unusual to see press releases from sites accentuating the spectacular or unusual (The London Gladiatrix, the Sutton Common 'ghost town' for instance - both were published as something completely different to what they were said to be in the press releases which the media hooked on to). In my experience, developers and university bureaucrats get terribly excited when their names appear on telly/in the papers etc, and so brownie points are scored with the management/funders by the coverage ('look, were not p*ssing the department's money up the wall on a drunken jolly, we've found something really important'). Mind you, I've seen press stories covering some things I was involved with where the truth was twisted by the press to make the story a lot more spectacular than it actually was. You won't be surprised to know that the Sun newspaper was probably the worst for this.