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Protests in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of protest 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 protests, demonstrations or protesters, 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, protests took 96.18 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 47.19 in 2025, a 50.9% fall in their share of news coverage.
Basis: Annual protest articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year; 897,888 matched articles in all.
June 2020, the month of the George Floyd protests, was the month in which protests took their largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 295.85 articles per 10,000, 3.08 times the 2019 annual share.
Basis: Monthly protest articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026; 38,414 articles in June 2020.
March 2020 was the month in which protests took their smallest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 29.14 articles per 10,000, down from 70.91 in February 2020; it was the month in which COVID-19 lockdowns began in many countries.
Basis: Monthly protest articles per 10,000 news articles; April 2020 was the second-lowest month (31.52).
Of protest articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 92.5% were negative in tone, 2.75 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; 99.9% of sampled articles carry a label.
A machine-assigned priority rating placed 81.5% of protest articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.91 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 | 69,505 | 30.23% | 0.62 |
| India | 51,154 | 22.25% | 1.69 |
| United Kingdom | 10,138 | 4.41% | 0.76 |
| Israel | 6,795 | 2.96% | 5.27 |
| Nigeria | 6,616 | 2.88% | 2.1 |
| France | 6,497 | 2.83% | 1.43 |
| Bangladesh | 5,452 | 2.37% | 9.15 |
| Pakistan | 4,615 | 2.01% | 4.43 |
| Iran | 4,470 | 1.94% | 6.51 |
| Nepal | 4,006 | 1.74% | 9.66 |
| Australia | 3,153 | 1.37% | 0.64 |
| China | 3,073 | 1.34% | 0.51 |
| Kenya | 3,049 | 1.33% | 6.04 |
| Palestine | 3,029 | 1.32% | 6.37 |
| Germany | 2,946 | 1.28% | 1.09 |
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 "protest" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Protests in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/protests/