The hypothesis is that google is, on the whole, parasitic to news organizations. I think, unlike the hysteria on HN, that it is far from obvious this is wrong. We'll hopefully get to see the results of the experiment.
Looks like the experiment has a good chance of being run soon. If News and Search drop these sites, we'll see whether the 'parasite' has been good or bad for the host.
If this were true, presumably some smart news organizations would be blocking Google from extracting this value by excluding themselves from the index via robots.txt, yet I'm not aware of any.