I’m skeptical that a Bing-News Corp deal would actually be beneficial for News Corp. I think the Google brand, when searching for general news, is stronger than the actual news source.

For example, if I want to know about Michael Jackson, I search “Michael Jackson”, and to a degree I don’t care what source gives me what I want to know. However, if I want to search for an article in the WSJ, I go to the WSJ site and search for it there. The first kind of traffic is beneficial to News Corp via Google, and that’s what they would lose if they struck a deal with Bing. The second kind of traffic, they were going to get anyway.