It does sound a bit like they're hunting their 15 minutes of fame.
I'm no theoretical physicist or mathematician, but I think I grasp this:
Time didn't exist before the "big bang", or more exactly, before the point when the energy density was so high that all the forces were unified. Time was a product of breaking of symmetry as the universe expanded and cooled. So asking "what was there before" is meaningless as there was no "before". Similarly, asking what the universe is expanding
into has no meaning because the expansion is an internal measure only with no reference to "outside". Of course, that's my imperfect interpretation.
Remember:
The truth is, there is no spoon. 