Cablevision Buys Newsday From Tribune

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.