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Airports in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of airport news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about airports, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
August 2021, the month of the Kabul airport evacuations, was the month in which airports took their largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 100.02 articles per 10,000 news articles, 2.28 times the average share for 2021 as a whole.
Basis: Monthly airport articles divided by all articles in the index for the same month, every month from January 2019 to July 2026; 724,354 matched articles.
Airports took a 22.3% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (44.29 against 57.02 articles per 10,000 news articles), and April 2020 was the month with the lowest share between January 2019 and July 2026, at 29.89 per 10,000.
Basis: Annual and monthly airport articles divided by all articles in the index for the same period.
As a share of all news, airport coverage had not regained its 2019 level by 2025: it stood at 49.75 articles per 10,000 in 2025, 12.75% below the 57.02 of 2019, although the raw number of airport articles almost doubled (67,325 to 134,271) as the index grew.
Basis: Airport articles per 10,000 articles in the index, 2019–2025; 2026 (January–July) is partial and excluded.
January 2020, the month of the first airport health screenings for the novel coronavirus, was the third-highest month for airport news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 82.7 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly airport articles per 10,000 news articles; only August 2021 (100.02) and March 2026 (90.9) were higher.
Of airport articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 51% were negative in tone, 1.52 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index, and 57.9% were rated critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale), against 42.6% of all news.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive (99.8% of sampled articles carry a label); top priority label per article, critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 78,169 | 32.24% | 0.67 |
| India | 51,625 | 21.29% | 1.61 |
| United Kingdom | 16,395 | 6.76% | 1.16 |
| United Arab Emirates | 6,380 | 2.63% | 4.04 |
| China | 4,978 | 2.05% | 0.78 |
| Australia | 4,932 | 2.03% | 0.95 |
| Nigeria | 4,884 | 2.01% | 1.47 |
| France | 4,439 | 1.83% | 0.93 |
| Singapore | 4,407 | 1.82% | 2.04 |
| Germany | 3,809 | 1.57% | 1.34 |
| Canada | 3,661 | 1.51% | 0.7 |
| Brazil | 2,910 | 1.2% | 1.39 |
| Spain | 2,660 | 1.1% | 1.12 |
| Japan | 2,541 | 1.05% | 0.99 |
| Italy | 2,422 | 1.0% | 1.03 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "airport" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Airports in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/airports/