Inflation in the News, 2019–2026: The Rise and Fall of Price Coverage, Its Geography and Tone, and How It Compares with Research

We measure how inflation was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 495,566 de-duplicated inflation articles, and set that coverage beside 16,854 research papers on inflation published between 2015 and 2025. Six results stand out: A surge and a slow retreat. Inflation took 69.6 of every 10,000 news articles in 2022, 6.3 times its 2019 share. Its share peaked in July 2022 at 92.47 per 10,000. By 2025 it had fallen 58.8% from the 2022 level, but it remained 2.59 times the 2019 share. A pandemic trough. In 2020 inflation took a 31.8% smaller share of news than in 2019, and March 2020 was the lowest month of the period. Geography. The United States holds 45.47% of located inflation news but is close to its weight in the index (lift 0.94). Among the 25 countries with the most located articles, Iran (4.2), Argentina (4.17), Ukraine (3.97) and Turkey (3.08) are the most over-represented. Within India, Maharashtra (1.82) and Karnataka (1.56) lead; of the four most populous US states, only New York (1.52) is over-represented. Tone and urgency. 64.5% of inflation articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 60.9% are rated critical priority by a machine urgency score (all news: 42.6%). A central-bank story. The Federal Reserve is named in 14.9% of inflation articles, and central bank rate decisions appear in 18.57% of themed articles, 98.83 times their rate in all themed news. Research. Papers with inflation in the title rose from 1.89 to 3.17 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025, with most of the rise in 2022 and 2023.