News Corp. (NWS) president and COO Peter Chernin gave an upbeat outlook regarding his company’s prospects at an investor conference Monday afternoon, touching on topics ranging from the company’s rapidly growing MySpace social networking unit to its pending acquisition of Dow Jones (DJ).

Chernin, speaking at Merrill Lynch’s Media and Entertainment conference in Marina Del Ray, Calif. said that he expected News Corp.’s purchase of Dow Jones to close without any “impediments” but was tight-lipped about the company’s plans for Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal newspaper once the acquisition was completed.

Chernin also discussed the company’s upcoming launch of the Fox Business Channel, which I wrote about earlier today. Despite some concerns about an expensive launch for what may turn out to be a niche channel, Chernin said he thought the channel would succeed since it will have more of a consumer focus and “livelier presentation” than its top rival CNBC.

Turning to the company’s broadcast television efforts, Chernin also said he was optimistic that Fox would be the number one network with 18-49 year olds for the fourth season in a row and that the margin of victory over CBS (CBS), Disney’s (DIS) ABC and GE (GE)-owned NBC would be bigger than this past season. In addition to airing the Super Bowl in February, Fox also has a little show called “American Idol” that will return in January.

But the most interesting part of Chernin’s presentation was his contention that MySpace was not seeing much pressure yet from Facebook, the social networking site that has attracted a lot of buzz — and users — since launching its open platform for applications earlier this year.

Chernin said that while Facebook has become a “more significant” competitor to MySpace in recent months, MySpace has “yet to see evidence of Facebook stealing growth.” He added that he expected MySpace to continue to have a leg up on Facebook thanks to its international focus and online video efforts.

In addition, he said that he believed MySpace was focusing more on “monetizing” the MySpace property. As such, MySpace has an ad sharing agreement with Google (GOOG) and News Corp. has maintained that it expects its Fox Interactive Media unit, which includes MySpace, to generate revenue of about $1 billion in this fiscal year, which ends in June 2008.

Still, News Corp. should not overlook Facebook. To be sure, Facebook is still a distant second to MySpace, with 19.2 million unique visitors in August compared to MySpace’s 60.3 million uniques, according to the most recent figures from Web tracking firm Nielsen//NetRatings. But Facebook’s traffic in August was up 117 percent from a year ago compared to 23 percent growth for MySpace.

Chernin’s comments come a day before Fox Interactive Media’s unit head Peter Levinsohn gives his own presentation at the Merrill Lynch conference. So it will be interesting to see if he shares some more specific information about how MySpace plans to hold off the charge from Facebook.

Then again, considering that Levinsohn is speaking at 2:15 EST, the same time the Fed is expected to announce that it has cut interest rates, something tells me that his remarks might not be noticed. Call me crazy but I suspect that many people, even those attending the Merrill conference, might be just a tad more interested in finding out whether Bernanke & Co. cut rates by a quarter of a point or a half a point than hearing about widgets and other cool social networking minutiae.