Our colleagues at The Wall Street Journal used some data from Dow Jones Insight to blog about the size of the spike of press coverage of a possible link between use of cholesterol-fighter Vytorin and increased risk of cancer.
A few of the comments were hostile toward the post. This one was from someone called "Steve Walker":
So now the WSJ is going generate and report statistics on how frenzied the press becomes over junk science flowing from questionable meta-analyses? Then try to analyze why some junk science leads to less or more press frenzy?...
I disagree with this criticism. I think reporting on the media coverage of a story such as this is valid as is the methodology used to count the media mentions.
