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Comedy Central will pull episodes of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” from video Web site Hulu next Wednesday.

Episodes of the popular TV shows, as well as some library shows from the network, will be removed from Hulu at 11:59pm Pacific time March 9, Hulu announced in a Tuesday blog post.

“The team at Comedy Central have been great partners for us, and our users have been extremely vocal and passionate about how much they love what the Comedy Central folks are doing,” wrote Hulu’s Andy Forssell. “After a series of discussions with the team at Comedy Central, though, we ultimately were unable to secure the rights to extend these shows for a much longer period of time.”

Both shows have been quite lucrative for Hulu, a joint effort between NBC Universal, News Corp., ABC, and others.

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Faced with a steady drumbeat of criticism from a shrinking newspaper industry, Google is out to prove that it is friend not foe.

“Please don’t shoot. I am unarmed,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal counsel, told angry publishers last week at the World Newspaper Congress in India.

Drummond’s remarks may have been in jest but they summed up the state of the tense relationship between the Internet giant and a newspaper industry facing an uncertain future in the digital era.

Google has been accused for years of shrugging off the concerns of newspapers while raking in billions of advertising dollars from the Web.

That may be changing.

Drummond’s appearance before the World Newspaper Congress was just one of a series of moves made by the Mountain View, California, company last week in a bid to counter its critics.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt took to the pages of the newspaper owned by his chief antagonist, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, to defend the Internet giant against accusations from publishers that it is profiting from their content.

“With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame,” he wrote.

Rejecting charges Google was responsible for their woes, Schmidt called for a “change of tone in the debate” and said he wants to “work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers and make more money.”

In a peace offering, Google simultaneously announced changes to Google News, its popular news aggregator site that is the target of much of the ire of newspapers for linking to their stories without sharing advertising revenue.

It said publishers could limit to five the number of articles people can access for free through Google search or Google News and gave them the ability to exercise greater control over what content is indexed.

Google argues that it drives traffic to newspaper websites — as many as four billion clicks a month, according to Schmidt — and newspapers can easily prevent the search engine from accessing their content if they choose to do so.

Dan Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, said Google appears to be backing away from that “black-and-white proposition” of “we’re going to include you in our search engine or you can take yourself out.”

“It strikes me that Google’s saying ‘Well, maybe the content providers have a point and we’re going to start to offer some shades of grey,’” he said.

Murdoch has threatened to block Google from indexing his newspapers and has reportedly been holding talks with Microsoft about making News Corp. content accessible exclusively through the software giant’s new search engine, Bing.

Kennedy said Google’s apparent new flexibility may stem from its “utopian vision” of indexing all of the world’s information.

“If suddenly they don’t have, say, the world’s leading 100 newspapers, even if that doesn’t have any effect on their bottom line, I think that hurts their image of what they are and what they’re doing,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal is currently is the only News Corp. title to require a subscription fee but Murdoch has announced plans to begin charging for all of his newspapers on the Web.

Many other newspapers are also considering erecting pay walls around their websites and the tweaks to Google News close a “back door” some readers had been using to access paid content for free.

John Rose of the Boston Consulting Group, which recently conducted a survey on the willingness of consumers to pay for news online, said the changes will not however resolve fundamental problems between search engines and newspapers hoping to charge readers on the Web.

On the one hand, Rose said, readers are willing to pay for some newspapers with a “unique editorial voice or a unique content beat.”

But he pointed to “an incredible insoluble tension between search engines and newspapers that are essentially reproducing commodity news information.”

“It’s not really about the search engines,” he said. “It’s about the fact that your competitive advantage was the fact that you were only people who printed and distributed news in your market.

“And now people can get that news from someone else, and your competitive advantage has been removed,” Rose said. “You can’t charge for something that someone else is giving away for free.”

The trick is to determine a publication’s unique content and charge for access to it, Rose added, warning that “maybe not everybody will survive.”

Google Dec. 1 is letting publishers limit the number of articles readers can view for free on its search and Google News site to five per day. The move came the same day News Corp. founder and publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch lashed out at online aggregators for raking in ad revenues from content without compensating publishers. Murdoch, who threatened last month to de-index the Wall Street Journal and other paid content from Google, is reportedly working on a deal that would make Google rival Microsoft Bing’s fledgling search engine an exclusive host partner of Journal and other News Corp. content.

Google Dec. 1 extended an olive branch to newspaper publishers by letting them limit the number of articles readers can view for free on Google News to five per day.

The move came the same day News Corp. founder and publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch, speaking at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the Web age, lashed out at online aggregators for raking in ad revenues from content without compensating publishers. For example, Google News host snippets and links to news from a variety of sources and generates ad revenue against the content.

Google’s cap is a concession to this concern and comes to its First Click Free provision, in which participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content on Google News, or the company’s Web search engine. Readers who find one of those articles can see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe, even if the content is behind a so-called paywall.

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Hulu, the free online video site where television shows and movies can be watched in their entirety, will start charging fees at some point, one of its owners said.

Hulu has struggled to make money despite its popularity as an ad-supported site. News Corp., which co-owns the site with NBC Universal, Walt Disney Co. and Providence Equity Partners, said it hasn’t decided what form the subscription model would take.

Chase Carey, News Corp.’s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference in New York on Wednesday that subscription fees could come as early as 2010.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said last month that the company was considering charging for Hulu, but hadn’t made a final decision.

”Are we looking at it with a view of adding subscription services in there and pay-per-view movies? Yes, we are looking at that. No decision has been taken yet,” Murdoch said.

News Corp. spokesman Jack Horner said Hulu believes that a free online video site supported by ads is still the model that will ”resonate most” with its largest group of users.

It was not clear how a potential purchase by Comcast Corp. of a controlling stake in General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal will affect Hulu. Talks are ongoing.