It’s a clash of civilizations: the paywalls are rising again, Rupert’s on a rampage against the Internetz, and the subtext is none too subtle. Can media survive the www?

It’s the wrong question. The right one is: how did it ever survive without it?

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We’ve already covered how Rupert Murdoch has flip flopped his position on free online news, but his recent foray into blaming search engines and aggregators is really reaching the height of hypocrisy. We’ve already looked into the issue of aggregators and found there’s no problem there at all. Most aggregators either direct traffic to the original sites or are too small to matter.

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Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.

Now, that group appears have a lot of company, like the News Corporation (NWS), led by Rupert Murdoch, and the technology giants Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and I.B.M. (IBM), whose interest was first reported this week.

But publishing executives and analysts caution against concluding that this proves there is a robust competition to develop such systems, or even that newspapers will rush to join any of the projects. The contributions of Google and some others are little more than a set of ideas, written up at the request of the Newspaper Association of America, which inadvertently made them public on its Web site.

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On the web, lurid, sensationalistic news is priced at $0 (for now, at least). Maybe it’s worth exactly that. A kidnapper-rapist sicko has me thinking lately about the literal value of news. Yeah, I’m talking about the shocking story of Phillip Garrido, the California nutcase who allegedly kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago, apparently brainwashed her, kept her secreted away as his sex slave in his backyard shantytown, impregnated her and had her raise two daughters with no access to formal education or medical care.

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Rupert, you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me.

First the good news. You can sell content on the internet. People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right. But before I get to the how to, let me throw out some interim suggestions:

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Drippy Manhattan evenings aren’t usually a draw for an outdoor cocktail party but the FoundersClub NYC Internet Week soiree had something that overcomes a little rain: power. Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), was hosting two of the hottest not-so-new guys in town—AOL’s Tim Armstrong and News Corp.‘s Jon Miller—in the Rooftop Garden at Rockefeller Center and the draw was irresistible for Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy, Jeff Zucker, Sir Martin Sorrell and more from media, advertising and tech.

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As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google (GOOG)–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement. The Associated Press has threatened legal action against thieves of its intellectual property, MediaNews executive (and AP Chairman) Dean Singleton has seconded that threat, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the top editor of News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, growl in harmony.

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We’ve finally reached the point at which some of the finest minds doing the biggest thinking about the battered news business believe the best eraser for red ink is… charity.

Although they weren’t the first to make the pitch for newspapers on the dole, financial pros David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and his colleague Michael Schmidt gave the idea a boost last week in a New York Times op-ed. They posit that the best way to maintain the quality journalism of, say, the New York Times, would be to retool it as a nonprofit and run it from the proceeds of a $5 billion endowment.

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Today at the D6:Conference, the corporate doyens and business leaders were out in full force, both on and off stage. Those who were grilled on stage showed were true to their form–Amazon’s Jeff Bezos charmed everyone with optimism for Kindle, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang was all emotion and patience, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook showed that he is still a young fella brimming with big dreams.

But it was the wily old Fox, News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch who proved to the most charming, candid, amusing, honest and informative at the same time. Candid enough to admit that there isn’t anyone to really compete with him. Honest enough to point out what a mess both Microsoft and Yahoo made out of their deal, and Google is still a great partner. About Yahoo and Microsoft he said: I’m mystified. I can’t understand the whole thing? Neither can we, Mr. Murdoch. He talked at length about the future of media, both on and offline. His responses to a barrage of questions was lucid and refreshingly without corporate speak. He talked about online video, Hulu and future of movie distribution.

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Does News Corp. really want a piece of Yahoo? Word leaked out Wednesday that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (owner of this site–Ed.) is looking at taking a stake of 20% or more in Yahoo in exchange for MySpace, some cash and other online properties. An infusion from News Corp., the reasoning goes, could boost Yahoo’s stock price high enough to outstrip Microsoft’s hostile takeover attempt. This is probably as close as Yahoo will get to a white-knight scenario where someone saves the company from the clutches of Microsoft. But a News Corp. deal probably won’t happen. Why?

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After years of rumors, it finally happened. On Friday, Microsoft made its buyout offer for Yahoo. But while that was expected to happen, as both companies have had trouble catching online advertising juggernaut Google, what wasn’t so expected was that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would go all Murdoch on Yahoo with a hostile bid at a 62% premium over Yahoo’s stock price. But unlike Rupert Murdoch’s hostile bid for Dow Jones, Ballmer doesn’t have to contend with family ownership or strange stock structures.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the BIGGEST BUYOUT IN INTERNET HISTORY and only consider the business aspects, the antitrust problems, the privacy concerns, Google’s crocodile tears over Microsoft’s unchecked power, and so on. But what about the people who use Yahoo’s various online services, or for that matter, Microsoft’s? What will happen to them in a merger, and how might their experience change?

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