Facebook has long been the wet blanket of social networks. Its latest bucket of cold water: No more searching for people by relationship status. Because then you might conceivably get laid, and we can't have that.

Friday night is for dumping embarrassing news, as media companies well know. So it is that the New York Times now surfaces a secret deal in which NBC is said to cravenly promise to ease its criticism of Fox News.

A tipster just forwarded us the following email from the Wall Street Journal's Robert Thomson. There's a party on in mere MINUTES. And bring your party hats, because Rupert Murdoch's in the hizzouse!

The Wall Street Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson is close to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, personally and professionally. But that doesn't mean the Aussie is above somehow roughhouse ribbing of his corporate siblings.

Sure, Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi pretend they're fighting about a hot young model who calls Berlusconi her "papi." But that's just a banal cover story for what really gets the two men hot and bothered: media properties!

MySpace chief Own Van Natta is a consummate dealmaker; at Facebook he helped sweet talk Microsoft into a critical ad buy. MySpace is a trickier case: insiders at the social network are spreading word it faces "horrendous" user disengagement.

It's not clear what Chase Carey is thinking: The DirecTV CEO is poised to become vice chairman at Rupert Murdoch's smaller News Corp., where he has virtually no shot at the top job.

We'll admit, there were some funny lines in this serenade to Rupert Murdoch at the Wall Street Journal's "D" event. But isn't buttering up the boss at the absolute beginning of your tech conference a little blatant?

Gone are the days when the Wall Street Journal newsroom left brutal attacks on other media outlets to the Journal's rabid editorial page. Rupert Murdoch bought the paper to wage war, and it's happening.

Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have had it with parent companies getting involved with the content of cable news! They are talking, of course, about News Corporation General Electric.

(UPDATED) Despite reports he was fired for reviewing a pirated copy of Wolverine, Fox News columnist Roger Friedman will have a chance to argue for his job, a Fox News source said.

The Wall Street Journal's magazine WSJ. was the glossy linchpin of Rupert Murdoch's plan to grow his beloved newspaper's revenue. But instead of minting money like the New York Times' T, it's shriveling.

The Wall Street Journal will never be such a toy to Rupert Murdoch as the mogul's cash-bleeding, score-settling New York Post. But at the moment it does seem an indulgence.

The Scientologist who voices Bart Simpson used the character in robo-calls promoting a Los Angeles-area cult event. Simpsons creator Fox could not have been pleased.

Jon Stewart humiliated pundit Tucker Carlson with a public deconstruction years ago. But his disassembling of media villain Rupert Murdoch last night was, in a way, more damning.

For the most part, Rupert Murdoch courts controversy. "He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road," Michael Wolff writes in a biography of the News Corporation chairman. But he's touchy about his third wife, Wendi Deng, nearly 40 years his junior. He was upset when the Wall Street Journal decided to profile her in 2000. And he is suspected to be behind the spiking of a Fortune contributor's Deng profile for an Australian newspaper chain he partly owned at the time, and the subsequent sanitization of Deng's Wikipedia entry. So Murdoch can't be tickled that Wolff says Deng has him by the short wires, according to the Times' new review of Wolff's Murdoch bio:

Face it, Sarah Palin is now a fixture among the East Coast elite whether she wins or loses Nov. 4. The Republican vice presidential nominee has lodged herself like some kind of tumor in the media psyche. Saturday Night Live is quite lucratively obsessed with her, as are newspapers, magazines, websites, the list goes on basically forever. And now, says the Hollywood Reporter, "producers and agents across the entertainment world" want her to star in a daytime talk show, news program or reality TV series, at least in between her attempts to rule the free world.

If it wasn't inevitable from the get-go that Rupert Murdoch would, via tentacles that touch every distribution channel and medium, obtain an advance copy of Michael Wolff's biography of him, it certainly became so when the book landed in the hands of the News Corporation chairman's son-in-law Matthew Freud. Freud got it from a London newspaper negotiating serialization rights, Murdoch got it from Freud, and Wolff soon heard from Murdoch, the Times reported this morning: "[The book] contains some extremely damaging misstatements of fact," he emailed, thus playing into Wolff's hands, as he seems to have done from the beginning.

Rupert Murdoch seems to have transferred his politician crush from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin. His tentative support for Palin (and her obscure running mate) on the financial meltdown tonight evolved into a "quite chummy" run-in at a charity gala for the Manhattan media elites Palin claims not to care about. Murdoch gave Palin a pat on the back and said "thank you very much" as Palin left the gala, while Palin wore the "radiant smile" of not caring, according to a media pool report summarized by Politico. And to think that just four months ago Murdoch called Obama a "rock star." What happened?

It's the nature of the media business to take profits from the suffering of others, and coverage of the recent financial meltdown is no exception, helping to drive online traffic and (no doubt) newsstand sales. But the Wall Street Journal should be more discreet about its gloating, particularly given the newspaper will soon eject 50 of its own staff into the economic wilderness now home to the likes of Lehman Brothers. At least one Journal staffer was none too pleased to see an internal news item today headlined "Market Turmoil Provides Hook to Sell U.S. Journal in London." (It's reprinted in full after the jump.)