About & Methodology

how this site actually works, no hand-waving

What this site is

News Alternative takes real, current news stories and generates two AI-written rewrites of each one — one framed the way left-leaning coverage tends to read, one framed the way right-leaning coverage tends to read — starting from the same underlying facts. The goal is to make framing itself visible: to show how the same true events can be presented in ways that lead readers toward different conclusions, without any individual sentence being false.

It is not a news outlet. It doesn't do original reporting, doesn't have correspondents, and isn't trying to break stories. Think of it more as a working demonstration of a media-literacy idea than a substitute for reading actual journalism.

How a story gets made, step by step

  1. Once a day, an automated process searches for current, real news headlines on the topics this site covers.
  2. For each headline found, it extracts a short, neutral, factual summary — the version with no framing applied at all.
  3. That neutral summary is then rewritten twice by AI: once in a style representative of left-leaning coverage, once in a style representative of right-leaning coverage. Both rewrites are instructed to invent no new facts, quotes, or statistics beyond what's in the neutral summary — only emphasis, word choice, and structure are allowed to vary.
  4. A third step scores how much the two rewrites actually diverge from each other, on a scale of 1 to 10, and the story with the widest gap that day gets pinned to the homepage as the "biggest split in coverage."
  5. Everything gets saved to a daily archive, and any framing technique used gets logged to the running Framing Glossary.

What's AI-generated vs. hand-written

Page / featureProvenance
Daily story rewrites (homepage)AI-generated, automatically, once a day
Paste-in story rewritesAI-generated, on request, when a visitor uses the feature
Framing GlossaryAI-generated technique notes, auto-logged from daily stories
"Loaded phrase of the day"Pulled from AI-generated daily data, not written separately
Field Guide to FramingHand-written
Bias & Manipulation LibraryHand-written
Terminology DictionaryHand-written
This page, and the FAQHand-written

What this site is not trying to do

It's not trying to tell you which framing is "right," push you toward a political position, or replace the judgment you'd bring to reading two different newspapers yourself. The rewrites are illustrative examples of a technique, not a claim about how any specific real outlet actually covered that day's news. If a rewrite reads as exaggerated, that's worth noticing — real coverage varies in how heavy-handed its framing gets, and these examples aren't calibrated to match any particular outlet's actual voice.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or feedback about how the site works — email (enable JavaScript to see email).

Questions not answered here may be covered on the FAQ page. This page describes the mechanism as built; if you notice the site behaving differently from what's described here, that likely means this page is due for an update.