Cartels tend to arise in markets where there are few firms and each firm has a significant share of the market. Mark Cuban believes Bing can pay News Corp and other content producers for exclusive access to their content, and in turn help News Corp reclaim revenue they believe they have lost to Google. Danny Sullivan debunks this quite effectively in his post Thoughts on a "Killer" Bing-News Corp Deal & the Myth of an "OPEC for News". Exclusivity, oligopoly, monopoly, cartel – none of these can work in the news business. No one firm or group of firms has significant market share and any single source can be replaced. For this reason, the "price" of a single news article is essentially zero.
On Alacra Street Pulse this morning there are links to 22 stories on Cadbury that contain an analyst comment. On Deal Pulse (subscribers only) there are 82 stories covering the Kraft-Cadbury deal. The sources are diverse and so is much of the coverage. A barbed wire fence won't hold water, even for an instant.
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