In this clip from CNBC, a Playboy executive describes his company's new social network, PlayboyU, as a place where college students can "commune" with each other. Right. If that's what you want to call it. My take? "The bunny's not going to get much of a bang," I told CNBC.

CNBC reporter Julia Boorstin chatted me up about Google's drop in the customer-satisfaction rankings, amid a host of complaints about Gmail, Google News's new comments experiment, and other bad moves. My assertion: Yes, Google's got a valuable brand, but its users don't have a deep emotional connection with that brand, and it's ultimately a fragile relationship. How fragile? Check out the eyebrow action! You know a company's in trouble when a pundit deploys the dreaded raised eyebrow.

When I compared the inadvertent release of Facebook's source code to a tabloid publishing nudie shots of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, CNBC host Melissa Francis said she had no idea what I was talking about. Heck, I had no idea what I was talking about. I think the point was that the episode was embarrassing but mostly meaningless. Sort of like this clip!

"Dow Jones is expected to reach a definitive agreement tonight to be acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CNBC's David Faber reported." Either way, just get it over with already! [CNBC]

Earlier this week, CNBC asked me to come on the air to discuss Facebook's legal woes. Click to viewI've spent days immersed in legal filings, and the clip, above, just scratches the surface of what I've learned. Next week comes a critical moment for Facebook, the red-hot social network that has captured Silicon Valley's imagination, and its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. After the jump, I explain why Zuckerberg will face a moment of reckoning next Wednesday, July 25, and detail a timeline of Facebook's legal battles.

Witness the dueling goatees! The raised eyebrows! The utter failure to reveal any new facts about the man behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs! News.com's Tom Krazit and I duke it out in trying to explain the Fake Steve Jobs phenomenon for CNBC's Melissa Francis. (Video by CNBC)

If you missed our saturation coverage of all things Facebook, here's a nice recap. CNBC's Melissa Francis quizzes yours truly on the scandal about "Valleyfreude," the IPO-promoting video by Facebook employee Randi Jayne, the sister of CEO Mark Zuckerberg: (Video by CNBC)

Today's developments in the continuing Rupert Murdoch saga:

Last Friday, CNBC ran a video clip about the Maltese Falcon, a $130 million clipper yacht owned by one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley. But the business cable channel got his name wrong. Tom Perkins, cofounder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former HP board member, owns the Falcon, not, as CNBC.com had it, "Tony Perkins," the considerably less wealthy founder of Red Herring. I'm not surprised Tony hasn't rushed to get a correction. As any ex-Herring employee can tell you, he's never hastened to correct anyone who mistakenly believed he had a connection to Kleiner Perkins.

"Wall Street Journal staff apparently have been told not to appear on CNBC today. That's how [Times business reporter] Andrew Sorkin ended up on the show at 8 o'clock—and why there is barely any Murdoch coverage even though it's a huge, huge story."

While DealBreaker may think that the "Rupert Murdoch desires Dow Jones" story has burned itself out in an orgy of navel-gazing and media self-obsession, well, there's nothing that excites us more! So let's have a quick recap of what people are saying today. The Times looks at the insider trading suit filed yesterday and notes that Dow Jones is "conducting an internal investigation into the actions of David K. P. Li, who is a longtime [Dow] director and a banker in Asia, people involved in the situation said." The Guardian suggests that, whatever the outcome of the proposed takeover, it has caused investors to reevaluate the worth of media properties. The Observer covers the letter-writing campaign from anxious staffers to the Bancroft family and offers an incredibly handy guide to the family itself.

It's next week already, and dark lord Rupert Murdoch still craves Dow Jones. On Friday, the first shareholder, a minor one, filed suit against the standing-firm Bancroft family for not considering the Murdoch offer: That shareholder is a whiny little bitch from New Jersey and we imagine that claim will be thrown out faster than a cat litter box full of rotten squid. But how are the real players doing?

• Hey, who tagged our office? And what the heck does it say?
  

• CNBC is backing Maria Bartiromo because, really, what else do you know about CNBC apart from Maria Bartiromo? [NYT]
  

Since the sordid tale of the relationship between former Citigroup exec Todd S. Thomson and CNBC's Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo (and yes, she's had that nickname trademarked, thanks) broke, we've obligingly pointed you toward some of the coverage of the scandal. But then we realized that it might be doing you, our readers, a service to explain what's really at stake here.

• The secret to Headline News' success? Bloviators, and plenty of 'em. [NYT]
  

So the big news in media circles, if you care about that sort of thing (and, really, what's more exciting, Danny DeVito drunk on 'The View'? We think not.), is Maurice "Hank" Greenberg's plan to buy the New York Times. This morning's Post reported that the "billionaire insurance titan" has been "buying huge blocks of New York Times stock to break the Sulzberger family's stranglehold on the media empire." This afternoon, CNBC's Charlie Gasparino (yeah, just pretend that you know who he is) advanced the story, claiming

• NBC Cuts: Approximately 700 jobs axed, MSNBC moved from Secaucus, news budget slashed, expensive dramas abandoned. [Bloomberg]
• Of course, if you believe the Times, the layoffs will not be extensive. [NYT]
• Also, the network now plans to buy more of its crappy programming from its in-house studio. Insert your own "And such small portions" joke here. [WSJ]
• And MSNBC "stars" like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews may be moved to CNBC, which means we might actually start watching MSNBC. [B&C]
• In non-NBC news, you'll soon be able to see the Wall Street Journal's repellent editorials in full color. The rest of the paper, too. [AdAge]

• New editor of Newsweek still believes in relevance of newsweeklies. Poor, deluded sap. [WP]
• Writer Lee Siegel "suspended" from TNR, ostensibly for misrepresenting himself on the web. Our theory: No one gets away with being more pretentious than Leon Wieseltier at the mag. No one. [NYO]
• Phillipe Dauman, newest recipient of Sumner Redstone's puppet-string implant surgery, wants Viacom to identify opportunities like YouTube before other organizations can. Seeing as Tom Freston got canned for failing to do that, it's probably a good idea. [Reuters]
• The stench in the CNBC newsroom isn't just that of failure. Well, at least not yesterday. [NYDN]