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Poverty in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of poverty 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 poverty, 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, poverty's share of news coverage fell from 8.41 articles per 10,000 news articles in 2019 to 5.19 in 2025, a decline of 38.3%, and the share was lower in 2025 than in any other complete year of the period.
Basis: Annual counts of 96,194 matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
Poverty coverage in the news shows little seasonality: between 2019 and 2025, October carried the largest average share of a year's poverty articles (9.4%) and February the smallest (7.6%), against 8.33% for an even spread.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
October 2019, the month in which the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was announced for an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty, was the month in which poverty took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 11.14 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly poverty articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Of poverty articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 54% were negative in tone, 1.61 times the 33.6% negative share across all news, and machine priority ratings placed 76.2% of them at critical priority, 1.79 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top sentiment label and top priority label of each article; critical = priority ≥ 7 on a 1–9 scale.
Intergenerational poverty and systemic barriers was the fifth most frequent theme in poverty news between January 2023 and July 2026, carried by 4.09% of themed poverty articles (911 articles), and it was almost never assigned outside poverty coverage (lift 1,363.55 against all themed news).
Basis: Theme labels assigned to each article; lift against all themed news.
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 | 6,331 | 26.04% | 0.54 |
| India | 3,348 | 13.77% | 1.04 |
| Nigeria | 3,130 | 12.88% | 9.4 |
| United Kingdom | 1,944 | 8.0% | 1.37 |
| China | 465 | 1.91% | 0.73 |
| Brazil | 412 | 1.69% | 1.96 |
| Ghana | 404 | 1.66% | 3.45 |
| Pakistan | 380 | 1.56% | 3.45 |
| Canada | 378 | 1.56% | 0.72 |
| South Africa | 360 | 1.48% | 3.26 |
| Indonesia | 310 | 1.28% | 4.59 |
| France | 308 | 1.27% | 0.64 |
| Australia | 265 | 1.09% | 0.51 |
| Argentina | 252 | 1.04% | 5.29 |
| Bangladesh | 237 | 0.97% | 3.76 |
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 "poverty" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Poverty in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/poverty/