Now that someone has said this I realise I've been doing the same for quite some time. It looks like a PR department with a university attached.
Edit: it's not so much that it's usually just low quality, it's the offputting way they always state "MIT researchers prove that...", and whenever I dig into the area it's clear there's an active research community with leading figures in less fashionable universities that get no mention from the MIT press corps. The other top US universities don't seem to do this, at least nowhere near as much as MIT. Then again, maybe it's the general press and public who have bought into MIT fetishism and they're the reason these stories get picked up so often. (Saying all that, Aaronson is pretty awesome though)