The media is all atwitter at the news that Yahoo! is now seeking a rabbit hole in Rupert Murdoch’s patch rather than get bought by Microsoft – at least not for the ungodly sum of $44.6 billion currently on the table.

What started on the Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch blogs has now been picked up by leak central, er, the Wall Street Journal, which, since it’s now owned by News Corp, is fortuitously positioned.

Anyway, Yahoo! and News Corp. are supposedly talking about a joint venture that would see Rupert fold MySpace and some other News Corp. Internet properties into Yahoo – as well as infuse cash – in exchange for a better-than-20% stake in Yahoo, an idea that’s at least as old as last year.

The gating factor is the valuation that would be given MySpace – and hence the size of Rupert’s stake in Yahoo – and the cash infusion could reportedly come from private equity but if the whole thing came off Yahoo would get its nominal independence and Rupert would get a lot more advertising space. What Yahoo stockholders get out of it is unclear.

And to think only last week Rupert was saying that he wasn’t interested in acquiring Yahoo and when asked about the exchange of MySpace for a piece of Yahoo, he said, “I think that day has passed but you never know.” No, you don’t.