It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad media world, and we’re just players, right? We don’t even have Walter Cronkite to tell us how it is anymore. The latest to the fray is Mediaite.com, and on today’s Wilshire & Washington, we have Rachel Sklar, the Editor-at-Large for Mediaite and a former senior contributing editor here at Huffington Post, to talk about this new venture. One of the site’s most interesting features is its Power Grid, which uses a proprietary algorithm to determine the top voices in 12 different media categories. (Damn popularity. You thought you escaped it after high school, didn’t you? Not a chance.) It’s certainly an interesting feature (like a car crash, you can’t look away) but should journos be ranked like this? Does the feature inspire a narcissistic-type of journalism, with people trying to game the system? Sklar offers a few fascinating tidbits, including that men are way, way more likely to tweet their personal ranking than women. Hmm, curious.

Along with hosts Ted Johnson, Maegan Carberry, and Teresa Klein, Sklar also talks about the media feedback loop: Does the media cover itself too much? Also, can this “new new journalism” ever produce a figure of such towering importance and universal voice as Walter Cronkite? (TV news was kind of the first version of an RSS feed, right? Cronkite Aggregator? Sounds like an iPhone app.) Now we’ve lost the fabled newsman, and with the news media splitting itself into increasingly small segments of the population, can anyone command that sort of influence again? Finally, we touch on Obama’s upcoming presser tonight. What do we expect? Will he say anything new or novel? And more importantly, will he be wearing those mommy jeans again?

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player to the right.

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.

On Tuesday morning, at approximately 11:42 am, Southern California was hit by a sustained earthquake that government officials proclaimed a 5.4 on the Richter scale. Immediately following the quake, the mainstream media across the country held its breath, hoping for LA’s demise. Headlines popped up on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News, declaring “The End of Los Angeles,” “The Big One is Finally Here,” and “God Smites The Devil-worshipers.”

Felt as far away as Las Vegas and San Diego, the earthquake’s epicenter was around Chino Hills, about 30 miles east of Downtown Los Angeles. While media coverage quickly announced a major earthquake had hit California, very little damage has been actually reported, with absolutely no fatalities.

“We’re shocked, really,” says Mitch Dunning, head newswriter for CNN Online. “We thought we were going to have a real story on our hands. I mean, finally, the earthquake to end all earthquakes has hit Los Angeles. Millions should be dead. People should be at least fleeing on the streets in terror. Where’s the looting? The violence? The horror?”

Shaking his head, Dunning added, “Honestly, we’re all pretty disappointed. New Orleans gets all the luck.”

When details first began trickling in about the quake, CNN interrupted its coverage of a squash match between Vladimir Putin and indicted war criminal Omar Bashir. The network spent the next seven hours replaying a four second clip of the infamous 1994 Northridge Earthquake, under the lead: “Hollywood’s Deserved End?”

CNN and MSNBC have both promised round the clock coverage of the quake, especially now that it has ended and won’t be returning. They have also set up a hotline for any residents to please call to report any injuries, no matter how minor.

“Hangnails and up, that’s all we’re asking,” says Rick Mountainstorm, show producer at NBC’s local affiliate. “And if you have any good video footage of people freaking out during the quake, or even footage afterward of people crying, or you know, of a dog on a skateboard, sent it to us. We’re grasping at straws here.”

Many Southern California residents took a rather light approach to the whole ordeal. Most, since the quake occurred during working hours, took the chance to mock old ideas of earthquake preparedness. Workers hid under their laptops and cardboard boxes, laughed it up while mocking old brick buildings for not falling, and generally went on with their regular lives.

Dean Eckhart, an investment banker, said he and his friends made the most of the opportunity. “We knew that the earthquake meant no work for at least an hour or two, so we went to the hotel bar down the street and started tossing back martinis. It was awesome.”

After drunkenly hiding under the table in mock fear, Eckhart and his friends departed the bar, tanked and declaring, “Now that we’ve made fun of old traditions of safety, we’re going to go piss on bibles and the Constitution, if we can find some. Oh, and I would like to make a shout out to God. Thank you for leaving us alive. We look forward to trampling on the morals and cultural values of the rest of the country for many years to come.”

My thoughts are quite mixed. On the one hand, I’ll defend their putting that image on the cover of a major magazine to death. First Amendment, and bloody hell, it is just a cartoon. People shouldn’t take it so seriously. The problem with the image, and the media’s frenzied reaction, was that the people criticizing the cover kept on talking about all these regular folks (aka dimwits) who might just not get that this was satire. The pretentiousness of this assumption is very off-putting. The people who read the New Yorker, yeah, they get it’s a work of satire, lampooning all the attacks made on Obama’s character. So do, probably, many people off the streets who do NOT subscribe to the New Yorker. Yeah, we’re a dumb country, but I refuse to believe individual people (who aren’t good enough to read the New Yorker and therefore idiots) would believe the lies printed on that cover as gospel truth, a point that once again shouts into my tiny brain, “It’s not a big deal.”

Is it tasteless? No, no, it leaves a pretty nice taste in the mouth. The taste of, “wow, this image has balls.” Is it offensive? Hardly. Is it a major media moment? It is for the New Yorker, whose editorial board is all screaming, “w00t! relevancy!” in their best Harvard-based monotones.

On the other hand, my main criticism of the cover comes in looking at it as satire (and this is purely unimportant criticism, because it’s intellectual rather than political). Satire doesn’t have to be funny. So, you can’t attack it for being unfunny. Check out plenty of editorial cartoons (cartoon is a misnomer here) and you’ll see many that make clever statements using contrasting images. They’re trying to illuminate some point, if they’re good, and not necessarily make you, um, LOL. I do feel, however, this was a half-baked joke. The concept is, “Let’s show all the lies that have spread about the Obamas in their fullest form.” Okay, good start. But what’s the punchline (or the point)? That these lies are ridiculous? That’s not necessarily what this image says. It simply presents the lies “as is” without comment. There’s no perspective. The reader infuses the image with his/her own reaction. It would be like putting John McCain on the cover, and picturing him with a walker, an AK-47 to the head of Ahmadinejad, rolling around on a pile of his wife’s money, with his former wife (disabled) despairing in a wheel-chair behind him. Oh, and throw in his black “bastard” child, with the BLACK WOMAN that he allegedly father this child with. Make her a crackhead, too. Or, for more pure entertainment, McCain sucking on George Bush’s teat.

Is that satire? Eh, I think it’s undercooked. Satire needs a straight man, or a perspective of reason, to make the point of the image clear. For me, for this image to work, they needed a punchline. And the most obvious, and kinda funny one, that I could think of was putting this image of the Obamas in a dream bubble coming from Rush Limbaugh’s head as he sleeps in front of his radio console. There’s bound to be a better way of putting us into the image, without spelling it out as I just did. Smarter men and women than I could do better than this.