Reframed is an experiment in whether the news can help us understand each other, instead of just confirming who we already are.
What does the news do to us? We usually ask whether it’s accurate, biased or too negative. Those are fair questions, but they leave something out. The news also teaches us who our people are and who they aren’t, and lately it has gotten very good at that second lesson.
Part of the reason is structural. Our political identities have stacked on top of each other: where we live, how we worship, what we watch and what we buy all line up with how we vote. Once that happens, every story turns into a story about identity, and a disagreement about policy turns into a disagreement about whether the other side is decent at all. It also pays. Outrage drives clicks, clicks drive ads, and somewhere along the way half the country decided the other half is a threat. We believe that’s a bad trade.
Reframed tries something different. You get the facts first, with links back to the reporting, and then the strongest version of what each side believes and why. For the “why,” we partly lean on Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations research. People often don’t reason their way into their politics: intuition comes first, and the arguments follow. Progressives tend to lead with care and fairness. Conservatives weigh those too, but also bring heavy emphasis on loyalty, authority and sanctity. Today, each side’s case is written in its own moral language. We’re working toward something harder: translating each side’s best argument into the other side’s moral language, so it reads as something you can hear and not as noise you tune out. We’ve planned a test of that approach.
In terms of news we cover, we take the seemingly trivial cultural fights as seriously as the geopolitical ones. The Strait of Hormuz matters, but a celebrity’s 20 seconds on a stadium stage will ruin more Thanksgiving dinners. Those fights are also where identity gets built, even when there isn’t much to them. So we want to include things that trend, even if they seem small. What matters is not the severity of the news, as much as its potential to inflame the tensions that divide us.
We should be upfront about what we are. Reframed is built with AI, partly because we wanted to start somewhere scalable, but also because we found that AI can be intentionally used to bring a dose of nonpartisanship that we, humans, always struggle with. No person reads each morning’s briefing before it goes out; we read it after. But it depends on the work of journalists who go out and report the news. We may summarize, but they do the reporting, and without them, we wouldn’t be here. We link back to the reporting we draw on, but we think we owe them more than a link. As we grow, we want to find real ways to support the reporting we rely on.
That’s also why Reframed doesn’t run ads. A business that makes money from your attention ends up rewarding whatever keeps you angry, and that’s the incentive we’re trying to get away from. Over time, we want this to be a collective project, funded by people who think the conversation is worth fixing. We’d like readers to help shape it too, including deciding which arguments deserve to rise to the top.
We’re not naive: we know a newsletter won’t fix polarization. The incentives are bigger than any one product. But we suspect more people than anyone assumes are tired of being told that the other half of the country is stupid or evil, and would like a better way in. We’re building for them. We also want you to tell us everything you find wrong with it: hit reply to any briefing, or write to hello@reframed.news. The intention is to build a better platform that meets the ambition of its mission.
If it works, Reframed will sometimes loosen our certainty a little. We might still disagree. We’ll just understand how someone reached the other answer. We think that’s a win.
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Contact
Questions, corrections, or feedback: hello@reframed.news. We read every message — corrections to facts get priority.