The Kids Are All White: Examining Race and Representation in News Media Coverage of Opioid Overdose Deaths in Canada

Abstract

Problematic opioid use in Canada is on the rise, and opioid overdose deaths now number in the thousands each year. While opioids have long been responsible for overdoses among certain demographics of Canadians, such as drug users on Vancouver's notoriously impoverished downtown Eastside, it is only recently that fatal overdoses have also claimed the lives of White, middle‐class young people. This critical discourse analysis of Canadian news media examines the differences in racial representation in recent coverage of opioid deaths. I pay particular attention to the ways in which White opioid users are portrayed as innocent victims while other users, such as those from Indigenous communities, are often ignored or stigmatized as “addicts.” I draw on the work of Hall (1978; 2000) and Reinarman and Levine (1989; 2004) on the role of media in representing race and constructing drug scares, to frame the media narratives. I then discuss the Canadian government's current harm‐reduction approach to the opioid crisis, as well as calls from Indigenous leaders for “culture as treatment.”

Sixteen miles: New users, stock dealers, and racialization in small cities

“…Analyses of Canadian newsprint media, for example, found that reporting on opioids was dichotomous, featuring patients innocently following physician prescriptions or living lives characterized by addiction and street crime (Webster et al, 2020). While the authors identified date of publication as an indicator for this bifurcation in reporting, other studies of Canadian newspapers demonstrate that race is predictive of how opioid use is characterized (Johnston, 2020). Given these findings, we hypothesized the LS and the ET would describe opioid use, addiction, and overdose through dual lenses of sympathy and criminality, differing in relation to race.…”

How Racial Injustice Undermines News Sources and News-Based Inferences

“…I not only contribute to the epistemology of journalism literature, but I also contribute to the journalism studies literature because I explain empirical findings in journalism studies such as that whites are overrepresented in news reports as victims of crimes and police and, on the other hand, that Latinx folks and black folks are overrepresented as criminals (Dixon and Linz 2000; Dixon and Williams 2015; Dixon 2017; Johnston 2019). Journalism studies scholars have also noted that some news organizations that have increased the diversity of their journalist staff members have not proportionately increased the diversity of the information that they report (Benson 2005; Sylvie 2011) even though news staff diversity has been shown to affect journalistic practices and the information they report to some degree (Everbach 2006; Zeldes et al 2007).…”

“…I take up some of this slack because I evaluate news organizations in terms of their propensity to cause subjects to be in good epistemic states such as justified belief. As a result, this paper is a contribution to the epistemology of journalism literature.I not only contribute to the epistemology of journalism literature, but I also contribute to the journalism studies literature because I explain empirical findings in journalism studies such as that whites are overrepresented in news reports as victims of crimes and police and, on the other hand, that Latinx folks and black folks are overrepresented as criminals (Dixon, 2017;Dixon & Linz, 2000;Dixon & Williams, 2015;Johnston, 2019). Journalism studies scholars have also noted that some news organizations that have increased the diversity of their journalist staff members have not…”

“…Even though I focus on racial injustice's effect on news-based inferences, racial injustice affects news sources in many other ways. Some of these are that racial injustice can at least partly cause reporters and editors to propagate falsehoods such as Latinx and Black male's inherent criminality (Saul, 2018), that reporters tend to portray white drug users as victims while they portray Black, Latinx and Indigenous Americans as "addicts" (Hall, 1997;Johnston, 2019;Reinarman & Levine, 2004) and that mainstream news sources often cover racial injustice in a "neutral" way that causes non-whites to distrust these news sources (Robinson & Culver, 2016). These negative effects of racial injustice on the news can also be understood as part of a larger phenomenon of how racial injustice causes negative and false misrepresentation of Black folks, Indigenous folks, Latinx folks and people of color through media such as art, film, music and novels (Darby & Shelby, 1997;Hall, 1997;Smith, 1997;Taylor, 2006).…”

Which Bad News to Choose? The Influence of Race and Social Identity on Story Selections Within Negative News Contexts

“…Media rarely break from their routines and often cover news from the perspective of the dominant group (Bjornstrom et al, 2010; Marchi, 2008). For example, one analysis found, when studying the opioid crisis in Canada, though there were more indigenous victims than White victims, stories on White victims outnumbered stories on indigenous victims almost 30 to 1 (Johnston, 2019). In the United States, stories about African Americans are often negative, with one account finding that nationwide, local news present a whitewashed image of America in which African Americans interrupt to cause problems or interrupt when they are in need of help (Entman & Rojecki, 2000).…”