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

We measure how protests were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 897,888 de-duplicated protest articles, and set that coverage beside 20,173 research papers on protest and social movements and 977 patent families on protest and riot control. Six results stand out: A falling share. Protests took 96.18 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 47.19 in 2025, a 50.9% fall in share, while raw counts rose. Peaks and troughs. The largest monthly share was June 2020, the month of the George Floyd protests, at 295.85 per 10,000. The smallest was March 2020, at 29.14, the month COVID-19 lockdowns began. Geography. India's share of located protest news is 1.69 times its share of all news. The United States, the largest source of located protest articles (30.23%), is under-represented at 0.62. Among the 20 leading countries, Nepal (9.66), Bangladesh (9.15), Iran (6.51) and Palestine (6.37) are the most over-represented. Within India, Manipur (5.12), Ladakh (4.23) and West Bengal (3.06) lead; within the United States, Minnesota (4.42) and Oregon (2.24). Shifting attention. Protests took 1,457.77 of every 10,000 Nepal-located articles in 2025, 11.48 times the 2023 level, the largest rise among leading countries, ahead of Indonesia (4.46 times). In Bangladesh the share reached 940.73 in 2024, and in Iran 1,983.09 in 2022. Tone and urgency. 92.5% of protest articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 81.5% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research and invention. Papers on protest fell from 2.65 to 2.38 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025, after a peak of 3.26 in 2020. Protest and riot-control patent families peaked at 173 in 2021, and China's office held 817 of the 977 families published in 2015–2024.