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Drowning in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of drowning 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 drowning, with its date, location, tone, machine-assigned priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API. The tables measure news coverage. They do not count deaths.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, an average of 37.76% of each year's drowning coverage was published in June, July and August, against 25% if coverage were spread evenly across the year; July alone held 14.67%.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025 (within-year shares survive changes in outlet mix).
Drowning took a 42.9% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (3.79 against 6.64 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025.
Basis: Annual drowning articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
Measured per 10,000 news articles, drowning coverage was highest in July 2019 (12.35) and in 2019 as a whole (6.64); by 2025 the annual share (4.79) was 27.9% below the 2019 level, although raw article counts had risen.
Basis: Monthly and annual drowning articles per 10,000 articles in the index, January 2019 – December 2025.
Of drowning articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 85.8% were negative in tone, 2.55 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.6% of sampled articles carry a label.
Machine-assigned priority ratings placed 87.3% of drowning articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 2.05 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 7,703 | 37.67% | 0.78 |
| India | 5,814 | 28.43% | 2.15 |
| Australia | 824 | 4.03% | 1.88 |
| United Kingdom | 822 | 4.02% | 0.69 |
| Brazil | 321 | 1.57% | 1.82 |
| France | 289 | 1.41% | 0.72 |
| Greece | 272 | 1.33% | 10.61 |
| New Zealand | 245 | 1.2% | 1.85 |
| Canada | 217 | 1.06% | 0.49 |
| Nigeria | 203 | 0.99% | 0.72 |
| Italy | 195 | 0.95% | 0.99 |
| Spain | 190 | 0.93% | 0.95 |
| Singapore | 149 | 0.73% | 0.82 |
| Costa Rica | 131 | 0.64% | 30.6 |
| China | 124 | 0.61% | 0.23 |
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 "drowned" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Drowning in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/drowning/