ESTRO 2024 - Abstract Book

S2907

Interdiscplinary - Other

ESTRO 2024

1425

Digital Poster

Media news portrayals of radiation oncology: the emergence of negative sentiment

Dominik Wawrzuta 1 , Justyna Klejdysz 2 , Marzanna Chojnacka 1

1 Maria Sklodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology, Department of Radiation Oncology, Warsaw, Poland. 2 Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Department of Economics, Munich, Germany

Purpose/Objective:

In recent years, growing concerns have emerged within the radiotherapy community about the media's negative portrayal of radiation oncology. A notable example is the June 2023 article published by The New York Times (NYT) titled "Rectal Cancer Patients Could Be Spared the Brutal Effects of Radiation", which discussed findings from the PROSPECT study [1,2]. The description of radiotherapy as "brutal" sparked controversy and debate, leading to official statements from the ESTRO and ASTRO societies, which clarified the role of radiotherapy in the context of the results of the PROSPECT study [3,4]. Although this publication received significant attention, it was not the first case of negative media portrayals of radiotherapy in recent years [5,6]. Our research aims to investigate the media's sentiment toward radiotherapy from Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 to the present day. We seek to identify the primary themes through which journalists depict radiotherapy and to track changes in sentiment over the years.

Material/Methods:

We examined all NYT articles about radiation oncology from the journal's inception in 1851. Our selection of articles followed a structured four-step process.

Initially, we used the official Application Programming Interface (API) provided by the NYT to collect articles containing the keywords "radiation" or "radiotherapy" up to July 2023, amassing 30,427 records. In the second step, we performed a keyword search, excluding articles lacking key terms "radiothe*", "oncolo*", or "cancer". This step refined our dataset to 3,670 records. We excluded publications unrelated to radiation oncology topics in the third phase using 12 different prompts presented to the ChatGPT language model. This process resulted in a dataset of 646 records, which were subject to manual analysis by two researchers. The final dataset consisted of 342 articles depicting events related to radiation oncology. In the next phase of our analysis, two researchers autonomously compiled lists of topics from the articles. Any disparities were deliberated, leading to a consensus and the formulation of the final codebook encapsulating the themes related to radiotherapy in media news. All 342 publications were then categorized based on this codebook by the same researchers, with any discrepancies resolved through discussion to reach a consensus.

Results:

Our analysis found ten distinct categories representing media themes related to radiation oncology: five were negative, three were positive, and two were neutral. Table 1 provides an overview of these categories, including example headlines for each category and the counts of the corresponding articles.