European Central Bank develops a news-based inflation attention index and finds media focus remains elevated despite post-2022 decline

The European Central Bank published Economic Bulletin research introducing a dictionary-based daily index of “inflation attention” that measures how prominently inflation features in news coverage across major euro area newspapers. Using this proxy, the ECB finds that attention to inflation has fallen from its 2022 peak but remains above pre-surge levels, a pattern relevant for how inflation expectations form and how shocks and monetary policy transmit. The index is built from over three million Factiva-sourced articles from newspapers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain by calculating the daily share of articles containing inflation-related keywords, standardising each newspaper series and normalising the consolidated series to a mean of 100 over 1997-2011. The resulting measure is strongly correlated with HICP inflation (0.85) and remains relatively high even though inflation has been close to the ECB’s 2% medium-term target for some time, coinciding with survey evidence that consumers’ perceived inflation and one-year-ahead expectations declined more slowly than actual inflation. A sub-component breakdown shows energy inflation attention has largely returned to pre-surge levels, while food inflation attention remains elevated, consistent with food inflation at 3.2% year-on-year in August 2025; a temporary spike in early April is linked to the 2 April announcement of US tariffs.