And on the attack: “It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.”

Of course, Schmidt doesn’t pass up the opportunity to make his usual case that Google can help news publishers: “We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free.”

But his other language toward the recent critics is some of the tersest yet, showing how Google has had to come out fighting, at least for the moment.

And we may have reached a point in the debate where Schmidt’s main olive branches in the op-ed - Google’s underwhelming Fast Flip experiment, a promise of mobile news to come and a reminder that publishers can always de-index themselves using robots.txt - may not be enough to rise above the current Murdoch-vs-Google din.