It's not Google that's killing the media.

What you are reading now is an article, published by a Web site, The Big Money. One way you could have gotten to it is by going to TBM's home page. But there's a good chance you didn't get to it that way. You may have gotten here by following a link from Slate, one of TBM's partner sites. Or you may have followed a link from a blog or another news site. Or from a site that aggregates news, such as the Drudge Report. Or through a site like MSNBC.com that does a mix of both. If you happen to be reading it a few days or a month or a year after it first appeared, there is a good chance that you got to it more or less accidentally, through a search on Google (GOOG).

You'd think that by now people would have gotten used to this. But they haven't. The last days have been big ones for link bashing. Rupert Murdoch accused Google in a speech of "stealing copyrights." Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson called Google and other aggregators "parasites or tapeworms," charging Google and other unnamed aggregators with the crime of "encouraging promiscuity" (managing to combine fear of Google and fear of sex, in what could be a model platform for the Republican Party in 2010).

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair writer and media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, publisher of Newser, a site that shamelessly summarizes major media content in a way that almost begs readers not to bother with the original stories (its motto is "Know More, Read Less") has joyfully been trying to make hay of it all for his own promotional purposes. And somewhere in there, there's also Dean Singleton, the chairman of the Associated Press—a man who in his day job has built an empire by buying second-rate newspapers and cutting costs until they're fourth-rate—issuing vague threats about suing sites that misappropriate the AP's stories in some undefined way.

Welcome to the ongoing circus of the media apocalypse. At this point in news history, it seems almost cruel to crash the pity party of the print media. Hardly anyone needs an overview of why at this moment people who own newspapers and work at newspapers are freaking out about Google and everyone else who links to their stories, though if you do, this one from Michael Kinsley makes for excellent reading.

In all this hand wringing, though, there is a point worth considering. The problem is not in how anybody gets to a particular article, or video, or whatever other kind of Web content you want to talk about. It's that once someone does get to it, the content creators are lucky to get 2 cents from advertising on the page their reader/viewer/surfer finally ends up at. Even more than the recording industry depends on selling albums, the print industry got used to a prix fixe charge. Now they're trying to sell each story a la carte, and the math doesn't come close to working.

Blaming Google for this is wildly off base. Memory is short, and people have forgotten what it was that Google saved them from. Before the triumph of search, the standard prediction was that the future of media was going to be dominated by portals like America Online. Folks believed that with these entryways, any media organization that wanted an audience would have to pay for carriage. The alternative to Google isn't a utopia in which everyone magically finds just the high-quality content they want with no middleman. No, the alternative is Comcast.