Shockingly, I read newspaper…content. Like most Wednesdays and Sundays, I enjoy Maureen Dowd’s dry wit and political commentary. She’s brilliant and kept me sane during much of the election (except for when she wrote her column in French and Latin). But today, Dowd’s column took aim against a true evil, Google, for destroying newspapers.

Dowd, in skillful style, made no question about Google’s culpability. She just compared Google to Big Brother and said while Google’s C.E.O. Eric Schmidt isn’t Dick Cheney, he isn’t far off.  He hates your privacy, but he hates newspapers more.

Dowd is a columnist, and I love her for her opinions.  But this column ignored the basic economics and facts of newspapers’ relationship with Google.  She makes it sound like Google it’s just taking content, posting it, and then laughing as newspapers suffer. She writes “Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy…[Schmidt] declines to pony up money, noting that newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free and adding, ‘We actually like making our own money for obviously good capitalist reasons.’”

But Google does not take newspaper content or post it (with the exception of Associated Press content which it explicitly pays for), Google just links to the content.  Google, in fact, only added ads to its News search the beginning of this year. Before that, Google made no money directly from news search. But either way, Google just links to news articles.  It helps people find the news articles they want.  Google sends thousands if not millions of people to newspapers through these links.

But Dowd, instead of realizing how much Google increases the value of her content, tries to paint them as just a step behind Dick Cheney in taking over the world.

Newspapers as a whole need to stop looking for people to blame (Techdirt has the excellent point that Craigslist deserves just as much if not more blame for “stealing” all those classified ads it doesn’t charge for).  Dowd is just another newspaper veteran looking to protect newspapers without asking if there’s a better way.  Just because you’ve always done it one way, doesn’t mean business can’t evolve.  Look at how newspapers used to do business – they lost money. Weird.