> It's not a case of a lawyer working on something that happened to be in a business that Google competes in.
In the Forbes link Google talks about competitors. The legal folks from News Corp would be in a different category to that.
I appreciate the desire and arguably the need to have different people at the news organizations and people pushing for causes (e.g., going after Google for potential abuses or issues). I do with new organizations were more interested in reporting the news and not making the news, if that makes sense.