About

Why this exists

Media polarisation is not a new observation, but it is surprisingly hard to see clearly from inside it. If you read primarily from one side of the political spectrum, the framings you encounter feel like the natural way to describe events. The possibility that the same facts could be assembled into a fundamentally different account, with different protagonists and different implied stakes, is easy to understand in the abstract and genuinely difficult to feel until you have read both versions side by side.

That is the gap this project tries to fill. Not telling you which framing is correct, not claiming to sit above the fray, but making the divergence itself legible. When a story gets a Bunting Rating of 82, that number is not a judgement on either side. It is a signal that something worth paying attention to is happening in how the story is being told, and that reading only one account will leave you with an incomplete picture.

A quantitative measure of framing divergence is useful precisely because it is imperfect and open about it. The Limitations section on the Methodology page names every known residual problem. The number is a starting point for noticing, not a final verdict on what is true.

How it started

The Painted Bunting started as a side project to make a single hard-to-see thing visible: that the same news event can be told as three almost-different stories depending on where you read it. What began as a personal frustration with trying to understand politically contested stories became a pipeline, then a rating system, then a publication.

Who is behind this

Press and coverage