Interesting, have you tried browsing both with firefox, as I did and my script shield count didn't increase.
When I tried it for IE8 in the Independent I immediately got a jump of 150 on opening the page, then I got the site wants to run Flash activeX control, when allowed the script shield count jumped 188. But, for each page loaded it jumped about 60-100 and many site wants to run Flash activeX control for different pages.
This is one of the reasons why I don't use IE, activeX. So that site is media intensive, but it doesn't terminate or constantly rack up script shield count. I didn't try the second site with IE.