Why this exists

My degree is in international relations. The thesis was on Soviet active measures — the campaigns that fed forged documents and borrowed outrage into Western European peace movements through the late seventies and eighties.

What struck me then was how little of it involved lying outright. Mostly it was selection: which true things got repeated, by whom, in what order, and what quietly went unmentioned. The forgeries were rare. The framing was constant.

I later spent a year on a diplomacy programme and ran a team through a European election campaign. Different rooms, same mechanics.

Debrief doesn’t tell you an article is false, because most of the time it isn’t. It shows you the construction: what the piece establishes, what it merely asserts, what its framing is doing, whose interests that serves, and what a reader would need to know that simply isn’t there.

The six sections are adapted from Psychology of Intelligence Analysis and the structured analytic techniques the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence publishes openly. Those methods were built for this exact problem — reasoning carefully about sources that all have an angle. They aren’t secret, and they work as well on a news story as on anything else.

It isn’t a fact-checker and it doesn’t rate outlets. I don’t think the problem is that people can’t tell true from false. I think the problem is that a piece can be entirely true and still leave you with a false picture of the world. No rating fixes that. Reading the mechanics does.

That isn’t the same as having no view. It has one: that you should be shown how a story is built, and then left alone to decide what to make of it.

One person, working alone, in Europe. No company behind it, no funding, and no affiliation with any of the institutions whose published methods it borrows.

Years of my working life have gone into making things that had to explain something complicated to somebody who didn’t have time for it. Debrief is that same job, pointed at the news.

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