There is a Seinfeld episode where Jerry goes to a Catholic priest to complain about his friend Tim Whatley who he believes converted to Judaism just for the jokes he can more make about Jews. Concerned the Father asks, this offends you as a Jew? 1/n

Jerry responds, no it offends me as a comedian!

That's how I feel about trash we call journalism. I don't care who you criticize. Go criticize anyone you want. I do and you are entitled to the same rights and obligations.

Journalism offends me as an information consumer 2/n

There are a couple of major problems with the actual product journalism is turning out.

First, line between news journalism & opinion pieces has effectively vanished. I expect opinion pieces to be that but even most "news pieces" are little more than opinion about an event 3/n

Second, news is so shallow. Granted I'm a heavier information consumer, but it is not often where I read news and actually learn new information. Try reading a case about a legal or regulatory issue and see if the article explains ANYTHING about the underlying issues. Rarely. 4/n

Third, journalists in most cases have no actual knowledge of what they are writing about and on most important issues that is simply causing the quality of writing and product to go down in flames. 5/n

In one specific case that really stands out to me, a known journalist with a major outlet writes piece about a geopolitical event and it was little more than calling a couple of friends providing no perspective or background on this complex issue. Here is why this matters... 6/n

Journalists are both knowingly and unknowingly presenting wildly inaccurate information, framing, perspective, understanding, or solutions about the state of problems faced in the world. 7/n

Take one simple example: North Korea. Under Trump journalism coverage could be summed up completely as: stupid Trump. Trump deserves criticism, no doubt. However, they provided almost no background, framing etc. Maybe this problem lasts because of issues week beyond Trump 8/n

Journos write pithy news or op-ed stories add if the solution is so stunningly easy if we only listened to journos everything would be solved. If it was that easy, don't you think it would already be solved? 9/n

I'm not even going to touch the ethical or bias issues but they exist and are vastly worse than anyone in journalism is willing to admit 10/n

The fundamental problem to do this is journalists think their readers are idiots but they are really very smart. They can detect BS and not infrequently know much more about the topic than the journos. 11/n

First and foremost, until journalism solves the problem of the quality of it's basic product, treats it's customers or clients as not idiots, the problems says only going to get worse.