3: The News Coverage of the Opioid Crisis in Canada

This chapter offers a holistic understanding of the main issues, concerns, and topics that the news media focused on in Canada with regard to the opioid crisis. After reviewing previous studies on news reporting of the opioid crisis, the authors analyze mainstream Canadian news reporting. To obtain the authors’ data, the authors used the Canadian Newsstream database by searching for the term “opioid crisis.” The search yielded 12,029 news items which the authors downloaded, cleaned, and analyzed using a mixed-method approach involving qualitative and digital methods. The authors found that the first article mentioning an “opioid crisis” was from 2012 before politicians framed it as such. Using topic modeling, four major topics emerged in the corpus: supervised consumption and injection sites, overdose deaths, harm reduction, and mental health. In the authors’ study, the authors critically review these topics, offer detailed contextualization, and explore other issues covered in the news media.