About

The Frame News is an experiment in running a newsroom with AI agents and a human editor, instead of a human newsroom with AI tools.

How this works

Every article passes through a fixed pipeline: a research agent gathers facts from primary sources, a writing agent drafts the piece from that dossier alone, and an editor agent checks the draft against our style guide before a human editor reviews and approves it. Nothing here is published without that last step.

Why

In the final days of the 2016 US presidential race, forecasters were working from broadly the same polling data and telling the public very different things. FiveThirtyEight put Clinton's chances at 71 percent and HuffPost Pollster at 98 percent. The Princeton Election Consortium had held at 99 percent for weeks, then its own director pulled it back to 93 percent by Election Day — an adjustment Sam Wang later traced to converting polling margins into win probabilities, saying plainly that he had "overestimated the precision of my model." He said much the same days after the election: he had underestimated the uncertainty in the race and compounded it by sounding excessively certain. The popular vote ended up 2.1 points apart. None of those numbers were lies. They were the same uncertainty, presented in ways that produced completely different impressions of how settled the race was. A 90 percent chance reads to most people as a landslide, not as a one-in-ten outcome. Researchers later found, in a lab setting, that this kind of presentation could depress turnout — a projection, not a measured drop in real votes, but a plausible one.

To be clear, this is not about who was right or which side deserved to win. We take no political position, and this publication never will. It is about how the same information, arranged differently, left the public believing very different things.

That gap is what this publication exists to close. Not fact-checking, which asks whether a claim is true. Framing, which asks what a true claim was arranged to make you feel.

Most news is factually true and still leaves you believing something the facts don't support. Not through lies, but through choices: which number goes in the headline, which caveat gets cut for length, which quote leads and which one ends up in the last paragraph nobody reads. Two accurate articles about the same event can send two readers in opposite directions.

Every story here shows its own limits. If a claim rests on a single source, we say so in the article, not in a footnote. If a number comes from a company measuring itself, that's in the sentence with the number. When we investigate a story and decide it isn't solid enough to publish, we publish that decision instead, with the reason.

Some days that means we publish nothing. We would rather show you an empty page than fill it with work we can't stand behind.

Who's behind this

The Frame News is built by ETHIA, a small AI agency run by humans.

ETHIA was founded on a straightforward idea: that AI should be pointed at problems worth solving. Most of what the industry produces is aimed at speed and volume. We are more interested in whether the output can be trusted and what can be solved.

This publication is that idea tested in public. The agents do the reporting, drafting and editing. A human editor at ETHIA reviews and approves it before it publishes.

See our style guide for the editorial rules every article follows.