Oil Prices in the News, 2019–2026: Shocks, Geography and Tone of Global Oil-Price Coverage, and How It Compares with Research

We measure how oil prices and the crude oil market were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 213,183 de-duplicated oil-price articles, and set that coverage beside 6,951 research papers on oil prices. Six results stand out: Shocks, not trends. Oil prices took their largest monthly share of news in March 2026, at 81.22 articles per 10,000, 8.59 times their 2025 share. The next peaks were April, May and June 2026 and March 2022; before 2022 the highest month was April 2020. A shrinking baseline. Among complete years the share rose 1.38 times in 2020 and 1.62 times in 2022. Between shocks it drifted down, from 11.26 per 10,000 in 2019 to 9.46 in 2025 (16% lower). Geography. Iran's share of located oil-price news is 21.56 times its share of all news, followed by Libya (15.27), Iraq (9.43) and Yemen (9.07). The United States holds 42.7% of located articles but is slightly under-represented (0.88). Asia (2.14) and Africa (1.73) are over-represented and North America under-represented (0.52). States and shifting attention. Within the United States, Oklahoma (5.64), home of the Cushing storage hub, leads by lift, followed by Alaska (3.95), North Dakota (3.07) and New Mexico (2.39); within India, Maharashtra (2.52) and Gujarat (2.34) lead. From 2023 to 2025 the oil-price share of Iran's news rose 2.36 times, while China's fell 63%. Tone and urgency. 74.1% of oil-price articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 71.1% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research. Papers on oil prices rose from 0.85 to 1.17 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2020, then fell back to 0.9 in 2025, only 1.06 times the 2015 level.