News coverage about cancer screening: A content analysis

This study analyzes news media coverage about cancer screening in the Netherlands. We investigate the volume, tone and content of news media reports, how media coverage may have changed over time (2010 to 2022), how it may differ for different cancer types, and how information about cancer screening in news media reports is contextualized. The tone and content of news media reports will be analyzed in a two-step approach. First, we will manually (double-)code a subset of the corpus. Next, we will develop machine learning classifiers using traditional models and state-of-the-art models to investigate whether they can reliably classify the full corpus. This preregistration describes the analysis plan based on the manually coded dataset. The analyses will be only applied on the full corpus if the machine learning classifiers can reliably classify the content of news reports.