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Population in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news about human population change 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). It covers population growth and decline, ageing, fertility and birth rates, depopulation, censuses and population policy. Every row is one news article, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, 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, January (11.48%) and July (11.45%) were the two busiest months for news about population change, together holding on average 22.93% of a year's coverage between 2019 and 2025, against one-sixth for an even spread.
Basis: Within-year month shares of 42,392 matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Population change took a 38.2% smaller share of news coverage in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, than in 2019 (1.73 against 2.8 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025, and its share in 2024 (3.42 per 10,000) was 1.98 times the 2020 level.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
July 2021 was the month in which population change took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 5.58 articles per 10,000; it was the month of World Population Day and of a draft population control bill in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
January 2023, the month in which China reported its first population decline in six decades, gave population change its second-largest monthly share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 5.27 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 articles in the index; only July 2021 (5.58) was higher.
Of articles about population change carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 47.4% were negative in tone, 1.41 times the 33.6% negative share across all news, and 71.2% were rated critical priority against 42.6% of all news.
Basis: Top sentiment label and top priority label of each article; critical = priority 7 or higher on a 1–9 scale.
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 | 3,964 | 29.39% | 0.61 |
| India | 1,714 | 12.71% | 0.96 |
| China | 1,380 | 10.23% | 3.89 |
| Japan | 698 | 5.18% | 4.87 |
| Australia | 640 | 4.75% | 2.21 |
| South Korea | 538 | 3.99% | 6.65 |
| United Kingdom | 507 | 3.76% | 0.64 |
| Singapore | 396 | 2.94% | 3.3 |
| Canada | 370 | 2.74% | 1.28 |
| Nigeria | 236 | 1.75% | 1.28 |
| Russia | 206 | 1.53% | 2.03 |
| Italy | 198 | 1.47% | 1.52 |
| France | 168 | 1.25% | 0.63 |
| New Zealand | 165 | 1.22% | 1.89 |
| Indonesia | 126 | 0.93% | 3.36 |
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 "population growth" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Population in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/population/