Hey, I'm Brian Seltzer, live in Washington today, and this is Reliable Sources.

Here we examine the story behind the story and try to figure out what's reliable.

This hour, a new and urgent warning about democracy and decline.

Here from the head of a group called Freedom House about how to turn things around.

Plus, Facebook's PR drive, it's in overdrive right now trying to counteract the whistleblowers

damning claims.

Is it working?

And later with Aussie Media's collapse down national news, did Carlos Watson doop

NBC?

What's going on there?

All that.

Plus, Stephanie Grisham's confessions and much more.

But first, here's a new take on an old slogan.

One of the battle cries of the Trump era was, this is not normal.

Well, it's still true right now in the Biden era.

But the media is guilty of normalizing some of the aberrant abnormal, sometimes destructive

behavior happening on Capitol Hill and beyond.

Think about the coverage of the debt ceiling in the past week.

It's been more like a hostage-shaking, right?

But look at the language it gets used in the news reports.

Both sides digging in, add an impass, stand off, and then somehow it's magically resolved.

There's a sigh of relief.

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