The engagement of user responses seems to have no bearing on whether a news article will embed them. I cannot count the times I have seen some CNN, Business Insider, etc. article talking about the latest Twitter 'controversy', and the tweets they link to have a handful (zero-to-five) of retweets and stars.
Yep, so many mountains made out of molehills when the media reports on Twitter (or any other social media site). Now one guy saying something is apparently seen as a 'trend'.
