Rupert Murdoch-owned Page Six would like us to believe that the unwatched Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox Business Channel is such a deadly threat to the anchors at CNBC that they've all switched to "form-fitting V-necks in bright colors." Like Star Trek characters! We don't watch enough CNBC to notice any uniform changes but this seems maybe unlikely? A CNBC rep denies everything! Still, who can argue with "pants are no longer relevant"? It's the 21st Century! Nothing's relevant! [NYP]

On this morning's Today Show, Jim Goldman, CNBC's Silicon Valley bureau chief, said one thing is for sure: Microsoft will not kill the Yahoo brand. "This is one of the world's great brands," Goldman says. Instead, expect more social networking, "the whole idea of community or the idea of getting sort of a relationship — if you will — with the website. Sort of everything you want to do online or in the world you'll be able to do through Microsoft and Yahoo." OK, so that makes no sense. Great analysis, Jim.

Here's Dylan Ratigan of CNBC, going off on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger. And we do mean going off. Ratigan is a veteran of Bloomberg News, a serious business journalist. But not in this clip. No, in this clip, it's clear that a madness has begun to creep across Ratigan's cool facade. Why? Might it be that he, the stallwart reporter, has been up since dawn covering today's news? Bringing you people constant updates on Microsoft and Yahoo? Downing coffee and skipping meals? Might that be why he's a little loopy? A little crazy? A little giddy? Just like the rest of us hacks? Hallelujah say yeah!

The New York Times Co., News Corp, and Time Warner all saw their stocks fall to 52-week lows. The one winner amongst the pall? Lightly viewed upstart Fox Business Network, the only business channel politically incorrect enough to make staffers work on Martin Luther King Day, as Europe's stockmarkets careened. While, Bloomberg TV only had a brief live period Monday morning, and CNBC was on taped programming all day, Fox Biz was covering the crash live from the overseas markets. Dr. King did always believe in the redemptive power of work.

By all means watch James Cramer for the shouting, sweating show that he puts on. But don't actually take seriously any of the Mad Money showman's investment tips. In an on-air bet with a commodities bull, for $50,000, The CNBC host confidently predicted financial stocks would outperform other sectors in 2007. Oops. [New York Post]

Has Fox Business Network put a scare in CNBC? Not by the numbers, but by the channel's content, we'd say so. CNBC has picked up on Rupert Murdoch's "sex sells" business-network strategy. As part of its "Keeping America Great" series, CNBC aired a segment on "Sex and the Tech Revolution" from the AVN 2008 (NSFW) adult-entertainment convention in Las Vegas.

Blogger Robert Scoble made an appearance on CNBC's Fast Money, but it was a disaster. The stock-talk jocks were thoroughly unimpressed. Thinner screens? Products due out in 2009? Build-your-own cell-phones from Bug Labs? They were having exactly none of it. Here's the grand disconnect between the gadget-addled technofreaks of Silicon Valley and the portfolio-juggling quant jocks of Wall Street: You want to make money five years from now. They want to make money today. Never forget that, whether you're talking to a business-channel anchor or an investment banker.

I'm at CES and have been looking around for Robert Scoble. After literally dozens of seconds of futile searching, I decided to text him and got this as a response. CNBC? Bobby, what happened to online-only video? I thought that was the future!

CNBC and the New York Times have decided to share material on their respective websites in a move to try to stave off competition from Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and recently-launched massively-failing Fox Business News. Basically, CNBC (a General Electric company) gets Times articles that will show up on CNBC.com while the Times gets CNBC videos. We're not so sure if having Jim Cramer screaming at you from the bottom of NYtimes.com is going to boost anything other than annoyance. They should take a page from Murdoch's own playbook and only have hot staffers in front of the camera. . That means a lot more Melena "Urban Eye" Ryzik and David "Dork Hot" Pogue and much much less of David "Scary" Carr and A.O. "Suburban Dad" Scott.

CNBC's Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, dropped his predictions for 2008 in New York magazine this week. Along with some safe bets like "oil goes up" and "Goldman Sachs makes a lot of money," Cramer throws out some unlikely but not off-the-wall predictions about Verizon and Apple. But then when he gets to Google, he goes off the deep end.

Early ratings for Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business Network have materialized, and the news isn't pretty. According to Nielsen Media Research, about 6,300 households on any given weekday are tuning in. Compare that to the 283,000 watching rival network CNBC. The number is so low you won't hear it officially from Nielsen researchers, because it doesn't meet their minimum standards for reporting. While it's still early going and Fox only reaches about 30 million households compared to CNBC's 90 million homes, the numbers aren't pretty.

New York Times gadget reviewer David Pogue has signed a new contract with CNBC and is very proud of this. Here's our 100-word version of his video introduction:

On one of the biggest days of the year for the stock markets, when the Federal Reserve Bank announced its interest rate changes, CNBC's ticker went offline for almost 10 minutes. Ah, I loves me some live television. "Do we have to mention the Fed meeting again? We've had enough of that."

Wannabe online-ad giant Microsoft has scored a deal to serve ads for CNBC.com. The site's previous ad provider was soon-to-be-Google-subsidiary DoubleClick. This would be more impressive if Microsoft and NBC didn't already share considerable Web ties, like their MSNBC.com joint venture. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Jim Goldman, CNBC's SIlicon Valley bureau chief, runs down everything we know about Google cofounder Larry Page's wedding today to Lucy Southworth. Yours truly makes a three-second appearance.

Startup investor Peter Thiel warns CNBC's Maria Bartiromo that the current economic situation is dire. Inflation, economic bubble, deflation, blah, blah, blah. But unsurprisingly, the former PayPal CEO turned venture capitalist sees one bright spot: Facebook, the social network where, uncoincidentally, he's a board member. According to Thiel, "it's the one part [of the economy] where there is no bubble at all." Sure, Peter, as if we really needed the disclaimer you add: "Of course, I'm biased." Not even the well-trained Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo could keep a straight face at that.

If we're going to make fun of CNBC's inability to spell, we should probably poke fun at Fox Business News as well. In a screenshot from earlier today, the Dow Jones Inustrial Average must be an innovation from News Corp. TVNewser has an interesting quote from an ex-CNBCer:

Fox Business's flubs we could blame on the cable channel's teething pangs. But how to explain CNBC, which seemed like a high-school video project gone awry this morning? David Faber, reporting on Citigroup's current woes, said "Look at that: All the financials are up — except Citi!" The problem? Citi was actually up 84 cents, as a graphic showed five seconds later. But wait, there's more! In another graphic, shown above, CNBC had three separate misspellings. Video of the incident is after the jump.

In case you missed the whole hullabaloo about Microsoft taking a $240 million stake in Facebook, CNBC has the 15-second version. Tech pundits with a bad case of blogorrhea could take notes from the cable network's brevity.

Fox Business Network "could end up looking a lot like CNBC, at least during the trading day." Roger Ailes "tried to entice superstar Jim Cramer... Ailes will probably approach the network's other brand name, Maria Bartiromo, whom he first put on air in 1993, when her contract expires in two years... And he may be interested in hiring Liz Claman, the former CNBC anchor, after her noncompete agreement ends in mid-October." Also: Rupert Murdoch might be considering a cash settlement to end the exclusive arrangement between CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. UPDATE: Well, that may not be true about Jim Cramer. Apparently no one wants him, no matter what he puts out there! [BW]