Both newspapers featured José Miguel Mulet on different occasions, biotechnology professor at the Valencia Polytechnic University. This doubling-up also occurs in the case of Rubén Bravo, expert in nutrition from the European Obesity Institute. Among the non-personal sources, both publications also use the WHO, plus the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations), the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Environment and EFSA (European Food Safety Authority).

4.6. Most commented news

Gomis stated that “news is the journalistic expression for a fact capable of interesting people to the point of eliciting comments” (1991: 49). The participation and number of comments from the readers in relation to the texts on nutrition reveal considerable divergences between the two newspapers being studied. The 121 news items on this topic published during 2017 in elpais.com caused a total of 3,703 comments, which represents an average of 30.3 per text. However, reader participation is not particularly homogeneous. 19.6% of the information did not merit a single post and another 29.5% received no more than 5 comments. Only 7.3% of the news items exceeded one hundred interventions.

In the case of lavanguardia.com, the total number of comments stood at 637, giving an average of 3.7 per insertion. Distribution is also very irregular in this case. 51.1% of texts do not receive any reader contributions and 30.3% have no more than 5 comments. Only one news item exceeded 100 comments.

Table 12: The 10 most commented news items in elpais.com and lavanguardia.com.