Prostate cancer stories in the Canadian print media: representations of illness, disease and masculinities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the popularity of print media as an information source for men with prostate cancer, the representation of prostate cancer within this medium remains relatively understudied. This article details the findings from an analysis of prostate cancer articles published in two Canadian national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post, from January 2001 through to December 2006. The 817 prostate cancer articles published during this period were retrieved and reviewed using manifest and latent analyses. Three article categories, illness perspectives, medical perspectives and supplementary were identified in the manifest analysis. The latent analysis was guided by the connections between masculinities and prostate cancer in the newspapers' stories. Findings indicated a low frequency of articles that substantively discussed prostate cancer and that the descriptive content reproduced hegemonic masculine ideals, such as competition and stoicism. The presentation of a truncated illness trajectory and privileging of the curative aspects of biomedicine also depicted medicalised male bodies. Any discussion on the negative effects of treatment or explicit references to marginalized forms of masculinity was conspicuously absent. These findings support how representations of prostate cancer in Canadian newspapers predominately replicate detrimental ideologies and perspectives of men's health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".