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Air Pollution in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of air pollution news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about air pollution, with its date, location, tone, priority rating, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, an average of 22.47% of each year's air pollution coverage was published in November, against 8.33% for any one month under an even spread, and 44.79% in October, November and December together, against 25%.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025 (within-year shares survive changes in outlet mix).
November was the month in which air pollution took its largest share of global news in every year from 2019 to 2024, and November 2019 was the highest month of the period from January 2019 to July 2026, at 29.76 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly air pollution articles per 10,000 news articles; in 2025 December (15.51) narrowly exceeded November (15.35).
Air pollution took a 36% smaller share of news coverage in 2025 than in 2019 (5.99 against 9.36 articles per 10,000 news articles), although the number of articles rose from 11,056 to 16,162 as the news index grew.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
Of air pollution articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 67% were negative in tone, 1.99 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index; for articles located in India the figure was 78.2%, against 41.2% for Indian news overall.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.7% of sampled articles carry a label. Suggested new section: "Media coverage".
Of 108,189 news items in the index that used air pollution vocabulary between January 2019 and July 2026, 11,991 (11.08%) were automated air quality alerts, templated weather and temperature pages, cryptocurrency items or figurative uses, which a count of air pollution coverage must exclude.
Basis: Term matches with and without the release's exclusion patterns (templated alert openings, templated temperature pages, a token named "smog", figurative phrases).
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 16,836 | 63.83% | 4.84 |
| United States | 4,272 | 16.2% | 0.33 |
| China | 646 | 2.45% | 0.93 |
| United Kingdom | 641 | 2.43% | 0.42 |
| Pakistan | 291 | 1.1% | 2.43 |
| Thailand | 289 | 1.1% | 5.78 |
| Canada | 256 | 0.97% | 0.45 |
| France | 198 | 0.75% | 0.38 |
| Bangladesh | 194 | 0.74% | 2.84 |
| Indonesia | 186 | 0.71% | 2.54 |
| Nepal | 125 | 0.47% | 2.63 |
| Vietnam | 123 | 0.47% | 2.56 |
| Australia | 118 | 0.45% | 0.21 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "air pollution" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Air Pollution in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/air-pollution/