Cablevision outbid Rupert Mordoch on the deal, which was driven by the problems that Sam Zell had with the debt involved in picking up the media chain.

This is, I think, a good thing. Murdoch wanted Newsday as a financial backstop to the New York Post, which is in a real way his US flagship newspaper^*, which would have been bad for its readers.

Newsday is a pretty good mid-market newspaper, and it would have been cannibalized by Murdoch.

^*Yes, there is the Wall Street Journal, but it’s not in an philosophical sense a Murdoch paper, which is right wing tabloid.