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

We measure how poverty was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 96,194 de-duplicated poverty articles, and set that coverage beside 37,823 research papers (2015–2025) and 406 patent families (2015–2024) with poverty in the title. Six results stand out: Falling attention. Poverty's share of news fell from 8.41 articles per 10,000 in 2019 to 5.19 in 2025, a decline of 38.3%. Each complete year from 2023 onward was lower than the one before. Little seasonality. October holds the largest share of a year's poverty coverage (9.4%) and February the smallest (7.6%), close to the 8.33% of an even spread. The peak month was October 2019, at 11.14 articles per 10,000. Geography. Africa's share of located poverty news is 6.1 times its share of all news. North America, the largest source of located poverty articles (27.32%), is under-represented at 0.56. Uganda (9.56), Nigeria (9.4), Tanzania (6.39) and Argentina (5.29) are the most over-represented countries. Within India, Kerala (3.24), Andhra Pradesh (2.67) and Bihar (1.82) lead. Shifting attention. Between 2023 and 2025, poverty's share of China's own news fell 66.5%, the steepest fall among the ten countries with the most located poverty articles. India's share was unchanged and the United Kingdom's rose slightly. Tone and urgency. 54% of poverty articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 76.2% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research and invention. Poverty papers held a steady share of the literature, 5.52 per 10,000 papers in 2015 and 5.83 in 2025. Patent families are few, and 97.9% of filing-office records are Chinese.