Yesterday we mentioned Rupert Murdoch's threat to yank his Web sites -- including the Wall Street Journal -- from Google search and Google News.

Today, we bring you the backlash.

DailyFinance's Jeff Bercovici says that such a move "would be colossally stupid, and not just because of the massive traffic declines and resulting lost ad revenue." Because journalists want to "have their work, read, discussed and linked to," he wrote, Murdoch's News Corp. would shoot itself in the foot as far as its ability to draw and retain talent. He points to longtime Newsday columnist Saul Friedman, who quit the paper rather than watch his column be hidden behind an Internet pay wall.

Bercovici is dead on in the first part of his analysis.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld points out that according to Hitwise, more than 25 percent of the Journal's Web traffic comes directly from Google or Google News, and that 44 perecnt of visitors to WSJ.com are new to the site, many of them directed there via Google.

"Never mind that in order to get people to pay for content," wrote Schonfeld, "they first have to be able to find it."

Where Becovici might be wrong is the part about the Journal and other News Corp. holdings suffering from an ensuing talent drain. It's easy to call journalists a vain bunch, caring only about mass visibility for their work, and to a degree, that's true. But this is a new era for journalism, and the Wall Street Journal is still one of the country's premiere brands and a decent paycheck by any industry measure.

The betting money here has a negligible amount of noteworthy defections over this topic, if any at all. (It must also be pointed out that the example of Saul Friedman isn't truly representative, as he is 80 years old and, if not considering retirement anyway, was at least in a position to stick it to the man that most younger journalists are not.)

Still, the fact remains that while Murdoch might not need the strength of Google to aid circulation, to turn his back on it would be a short-sighted mistake.