Opioid Epidemic: CNN and Fox News YouTube Viewers' Stories, Claims, and Solutions

Abstract

Globally, in 2016, approximately 34.3 million people used prescription opioids for non-medical reasons. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 76% of overdose deaths are caused by prescription and non-prescription opioids. The purpose of this study was to analyze social media comments posted on 10 of the most viewed CNN and 10 of the most viewed Fox News YouTube videos posted in 2017 and 2018 regarding the opioid epidemic to determine if the public thinks there is indeed an opioid epidemic. Ten research questions aimed to determine salient themes, as well as commonalities and differences, in viewers’ comments posted to CNN and Fox News YouTube channel videos. This inductive, iterative approach to content analysis of secondary data was based on 8,761 posted comments. Because each post can be assigned more than one thematic code, this systematic content analysis produced 48,560 coded instances. Seventeen salient themes, including sentiment and drowning, were identified. After taking out sentiment and drowning (coded for all videos), the most prominent theme represented opioid epidemic claims made by the video watchers in their posts. This “opioid epidemic claims” theme accounted for 5,453 (24%) of the 22,459 coded instances and closely related to other themes labeled “pain patient,” “stigma,” “who is to blame,” and “solutions of how to fix the opioid epidemic.” The posters claimed that the war on drugs was a joke and that marijuana and kratom were good for pain and withdrawal so we must legalize them. They also claimed that others should not judge opioid users, that opioids were the only way to relieve pain, and that Big Pharma and doctors were to blame. Next, the analysis applied the gatekeeper theory and the concept of drowning effect, defined as taking the audience off topic. The prevalence of drowning was examined separately for first level comments (initial posts, not replies: 2,995 for CNN and 1,077 for Fox News) and for second or higher-level comments (replies: 3,418 for CNN and 1,270 for Fox News). Even though drowning was common among Level 1 comments, accounting for 37.8% CNN and 38.9% Fox News posts, it was nearly twice as common in replies, accounting for 62.6% CNN and 62.3% Fox News posts. Race-related comments were common as well, 55% of which were on the topic of the opioid epidemic. Multiple commenters stated that Whites get treatment when they misuse opioids, whereas Blacks got jailed during the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s. A deeper focus on these racial disparities is an opportunity for future researchers. Because the voices of people misuing opioids to get high were largely absent from the posts, additional research is needed to better understand this group of opioid users. Individuals who misuse opiods to get high were perceived to belong to their own group, distinctly different from the group of pain patients who were not necessarily addicted but dependent on safe, legally-prescribed opioids to perform activities of daily living. Both groups must be educated on the effects of the long-term use of opioids. Their use for chronic pain patients is harmful because opioids can lead to centralization of pain, which worsens patients’ subjective experience of pain and often causes people to take more opiods than recommended, leading to overdose deaths.