Water Pollution in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Coverage of Polluted Water, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how water pollution was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 36,432 de-duplicated articles about polluted rivers, lakes, seas, groundwater and drinking water, and set that coverage beside 11,739 research papers and 8,141 patent families on the topic. Six results stand out: Falling share. Water pollution took 3.2 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 1.98 in 2025, a 38.1% smaller share. Raw counts rose, but the index grew faster. Events set the peaks. The share peaked at 5.8 per 10,000 in October 2021, the month of the oil spill off Orange County, California. Oil spills are named in 26.5% of all matched openings. Geography. The United States holds the largest raw share of located coverage (31.65%) but is under-represented (lift 0.65). India (1.73) and the United Kingdom (1.74) are over-represented, and the Philippines (6.9), New Zealand (4.39) and Nigeria (2.79) most of all among countries with at least 100 articles. Within India, Madhya Pradesh (6.58) leads; within the United States, Maryland (3.49), Michigan (2.66) and Oregon (2.18). Shifting attention. The United Kingdom's attention fell from 5.01 to 2.55 per 10,000 of its news between 2023 and 2025. The Philippines rose to 31.68 per 10,000 in 2023 and fell back to 1.81 in 2025. Tone and urgency. 67.9% of articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 88.4% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research and invention. Papers on the topic grew from 1.5 to 1.84 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025. Patent families grew 3.17-fold from 2015 to 2024, and 88.9% of them were filed in China.