Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but this all seems like the fox-post-journal-fox loop to me. They are providing commentary on a controversy created by them, about them, revolving around link traffic. It should generate some 'news' content for their site, that is also about their site. They've even managed to work in a blog post about Google's TOS and how not to violate them that some people should probably read. I'd expect it to add up to a traffic bump.