I hereby challenge you, dear reader, to explain in plain language the Securities and Exchange Commission’s allegation against Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs. Prizes will include the respect and admiration of your peers, along with that reassuring feeling of a job well done.

Are you game? Good. There’s a catch, of course.

You’re NOT allowed to make an analogy involving any of the following: volcanoes, synthetic baskets of crap, housing, furnaces, an exploding Ferrari (or any other automobile), baseball games, earthquakes, gambling sprees, Murder on the Orient Express, fire insurance, the Indy 500, loaded dice, donut shops, arsenic, restaurants, the Gambino crime family, Tylenol tainted with cyanide, or castration.

All of these analogies appear in this mashup (video below), which shows speaker after speaker from C-Span to the major networks blundering through the substance of the allegations like cats trapped in burlap sacks.

It’s pathetic. Whether you’re a PBS viewer who thinks it’s just super to wear tweed with a pony-tail, or a Fox guy who wonders when the ACORN death panel will implant a microchip in your census, your niche media fails its most elementary task — explaining a complicated issue. Never mind balance or fairness; if you can’t help me grasp something unfamiliar, if you can’t even muster five sentences of competent descriptive prose, then you lack a core competency at the heart of your profession. That sucks.

Here’s some advice: if dumbing-down doesn’t work, don’t do it. Talk to adults as if they are smarter than fence-posts. It worked for Ed Murrow.

That’s what’s so interesting about the mashup. It tells us exactly nothing about the Goldman Sachs case, but it says plenty about what folks in the news business thinks of us. Seeking to employ terms the “common viewer” understands, newscasters reveal that they think we’re Ferrari-lusting, donut-eating, Indy-betting, castrated Agatha Christie fans with an unhealthy fascination with magma.

Preposterous! I mean, I’m nothing like that.

Really, I swear.

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