All datasets › Technology
Drones in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of drone 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 drones or unmanned aerial vehicles, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, drones took 24.73 of every 10,000 news articles in 2025, against 15.33 in 2019, a 1.61-fold rise in share; most of the rise came after 2022, when the share stood at 15.63.
Basis: Annual drone articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, complete years 2019–2025 (304,574 matched articles in all).
March 2026, the month of the 2026 Iran war, was the month in which drones took their largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 62.93 articles per 10,000, 2.54 times the 2025 annual share.
Basis: Monthly drone articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Before 2026, the highest monthly share of news about drones between January 2019 and December 2025 came in April 2024, the month of Iran's missile and drone attack on Israel, at 42.63 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly drone articles per 10,000 news articles; April 2024 ranks first among the months of 2019–2025.
Of drone articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 62.1% were negative in tone, 1.85 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.9% of sampled articles carry a label.
A machine rating of editorial priority placed 81% of drone articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.9 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: 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 | 31,148 | 27.34% | 0.56 |
| Russia | 16,767 | 14.71% | 19.53 |
| Ukraine | 16,371 | 14.37% | 26.75 |
| India | 12,083 | 10.6% | 0.8 |
| Israel | 3,913 | 3.43% | 6.13 |
| United Kingdom | 3,478 | 3.05% | 0.52 |
| China | 3,036 | 2.66% | 1.01 |
| Iran | 2,916 | 2.56% | 8.57 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2,531 | 2.22% | 3.41 |
| Pakistan | 1,216 | 1.07% | 2.35 |
| Germany | 1,178 | 1.03% | 0.88 |
| Australia | 1,142 | 1.0% | 0.47 |
| France | 1,054 | 0.92% | 0.47 |
| Canada | 873 | 0.77% | 0.36 |
| Turkey | 801 | 0.7% | 2.21 |
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 "drone" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Drones in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/drones/