Wicked Stupid Media Moguls

So, Newscorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley of USA Today, are whining yet again about how Google News is stealing their "content" by posting links when a search comes up.

As Weston Kosova ably notes they don't have to stand for this:

Google doesn't force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google's results with a few keystrokes. All they have to do is go to the Web site's robots.txt file and type this:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Poof, the site becomes invisible to Google. Their stories will no longer show up in Google searches. It will be as if they don't exist.

Of course, that's not what they really want.

What they really want is a law that:

1. Forces Google to publish links to their stories.
2. Forces Google to pay to publish links to their stories.

Because if they don't get both, then they won't get traffic and money.