Defining things

Australian artist Denis Beaubois was given a $20 thousand grant from his government.  He used the money to obtain 200 $100 AUD banknotes.  Beaubois did nothing to them other than stack them and record their serial numbers.  He called the stacks of cash and list of numbers art and put the work up for auction.

The $20,000 sold at auction for $17,500. 

Food Network personality Sandra Lee had a show where she creates food.  Unlike many if not all other cooking shows, she doesn't use base ingredients.  Rather, Lee takes pre-existing food and combines it with other pre-existing food.  She calls this process Semi-Homemade food and has her own cable show to show other people how its done.

She will even help her viewers make sandwiches.

Ed Wood wrote, directed, produced, starred in, produced and edited movies.  One of his favourite actors to use was horror legend Bela Lugosi.  Wood once convinced a Baptist church to give him enough money to fund a movie.  With it, he made a contender for worst film of all time: Plan 9 from Outer Space. 

It is so carelessly made that windows that look out to nothingness are right next to ones with visible sky.

If devaluing raw currency is art, making sandwiches is cooking and producing laughably bad cinema is making movies, can the bar be all that high for what constitutes journalism? 

Well, no.  Just like art, cooking and movies, it doesn't seem to matter how outrageous, uninspired or awful something can be, it can still be considered journalism.  In fact, much at this end of the spectrum even has a name: Yellow Journalism.  If it has the word in the name, it must be journalism, right?

Frank Luther Mott defined this Yellow Journalism as:

1. Scare-heads, in which excessive large type, printed in either black or red, screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news, thus giving a shill falsity to the entire make-up;
2. the lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance, inviting the abuses of picture-stealing and "faked" pictures;
3. impostures and frauds of various kinds, such as "faked" interviews and stories, misleading heads, pseudo-science, and parade of false learning;
4. the Sunday supplement, with colored comics and superficial articles; and
5. more or less ostentatious sympathy with the "underdog," with campaigns against abuses suffered by the common people.

Now, that's not all bad, and Mott says that some of those things contribute to modern journalism, notably "banner heads, free use of pictures and the Sunday supplement."  I like comics, so I guess

Those bits aside, the opposite of what Yellow Journalism presents should be what better journalism aspires to be.  Much of that boils down to don't lie about things and don't make up facts.  Sounds good to me.  Some might even say its easy though perhaps not lucrative.