University of California San Francisco, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, San Francisco, CA, United States.
Computational Epidemiology Lab, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
J Med Internet Res. 2020 Jul 10;22(7):e17693. doi: 10.2196/17693.
News media coverage is a powerful influence on public attitude and government action. The digitization of news media covering the current opioid epidemic has changed the landscape of coverage and may have implications for how to effectively respond to the opioid crisis.
This study aims to characterize the relationship between volume of online opioid news reporting and opioid-related deaths in the United States and how these measures differ across geographic and socioeconomic county-level factors.
Online news reports from February 2018 to April 2019 on opioid-related events in the United States were extracted from Google News. News data were aggregated at the county level and compared against opioid-related death counts. Ordinary least squares regression was used to model opioid-related death rate and opioid news coverage with the inclusion of socioeconomic and geographic explanatory variables.
A total of 35,758 relevant news reports were collected representing 1789 counties. Regression analysis revealed that opioid-related death rate was positively associated with news reporting. However, opioid-related death rate and news reporting volume showed opposite correlations with educational attainment and rurality. When controlling for variation in death rate, counties in the Northeast were overrepresented by news coverage.
Our results suggest that regional variation in the volume of opioid-related news reporting does not reflect regional variation in opioid-related death rate. Differences in the amount of media attention may influence perceptions of the severity of opioid epidemic. Future studies should investigate the influence of media reporting on public support and action on opioid issues.
新闻媒体的报道对公众态度和政府行动有强大的影响。当前阿片类药物流行的新闻媒体数字化改变了报道的格局，这可能对如何有效应对阿片类药物危机产生影响。
本研究旨在描述美国在线阿片类药物新闻报道量与阿片类相关死亡之间的关系，以及这些措施在地理和社会经济县级因素方面的差异。
从谷歌新闻中提取了 2018 年 2 月至 2019 年 4 月美国与阿片类药物相关事件的在线新闻报道。将新闻数据汇总到县级，并与阿片类相关死亡人数进行比较。使用普通最小二乘法回归模型，纳入社会经济和地理解释变量，对阿片类相关死亡率和阿片类新闻报道进行建模。
共收集了 35758 篇相关新闻报道，代表了 1789 个县。回归分析显示，阿片类相关死亡率与新闻报道呈正相关。然而，阿片类相关死亡率和新闻报道量与教育程度和农村化呈相反的相关性。在控制死亡率变化的情况下，东北地区的县在新闻报道中所占比例过高。
我们的研究结果表明，阿片类相关新闻报道量的区域差异并不反映阿片类相关死亡率的区域差异。媒体关注度的差异可能会影响公众对阿片类药物流行严重程度的看法。未来的研究应调查媒体报道对公众在阿片类药物问题上的支持和行动的影响。
