Finally, Cablevision Chief Executive Jim Dolan is sticking it to the Doubting Thomases of Wall Street by serving up the synergies between his recent acquisition, the Long Island newspaper Newsday and his 3-million strong subscriber base of cable TV customers and cable networks, we thought.

It wasn’t anywhere close to what we imagined.

Yes, Cablevision has launched a new interactive Newsday channel. But the interactivity pretty much ends with an on-screen subscription form letting cable customers order up a Newsday subscription on TV screens and charged to cable bills.

From the Cablevision release:

Located on Channel 611, the Newsday channel features both 7-day and weekend delivery options (Thursday, Friday and Sunday), and promotional information on the paper’s various sections and benefits, including local news, sports, Long Island Home, area coupons, the Explore LI feature section and classifieds. Also available through the channel are long-form videos of some recent Newsday stories, and information on the paper’s “Newsday Insider” benefit program for subscribers.

Meanwhile Wall Street cable analyst Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research not only thinks there’s little obvious strategic sense in the Newsday acquisition for Cablevision but that the Dolans, who control the cable operator, probably paid $150 million too much for the paper in May.

In his latest client note titled “Toys in the Attic…What’s Cablevision Really Worth?” Moffett says Cablevision is conservatively worth at least $45 a share compared with its current price of around $28.

In the breakdown of Cablevision’s assets Moffett values Newsday at just $505 million - a 20 percent discount in just three months.

No wonder top Cablevision stakeholder and activist investor Mario Gabelli wants improved corporate governance on big decisions and is calling for a sale of some of Cablevision’s asset’s to help boost the share price.

(Photo: Cablevision)

That goes to show you what they say about assuming things.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday , and we subsequently confirmed , that News Corp isn’t going to chase Newsday after all. Instead, it’s pulling its $580 million bid, paving the way for Cablevision to likely take over its fellow Long Island media outlet. New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman is in the race still as far as we know, but it’s hard to see how Tribune will take his $580 million bid when Cablevision has a $70 million sweetener on top of that.

Why? Apparently the economics were unjustifiable. What could that mean? The short list: Tribune’s quarterly financial results, which came out late Friday, show the company continuing to lose advertising revenue at its newspapers; media ownership laws might make it tough for Murdoch to take the paper yet keep his New York-area television broadcast licenses; and finally, a bid higher than $650 million is already a higher valuation for a newspaper than most sensible financial folks see as feasible.

That didn’t seem to bother Murdoch before. Here’s what he said on the News Corp earnings call (reproduced from our earlier blog entry ):

No, I don’t think Cablevision will prevail. Just be patient for a couple of days (inaudible). We’re certainly not in the business of getting into an auction here …

We’re hoping to wrap it up within the next week. And I don’t mean the end of next week, I mean within the next seven days … It takes two to agree. But we’re at a pretty advanced stage. I’ll just leave it at that at the moment.

Here’s what he subsequently said at the Time 100 dinner later that week, according to the New York Observer (whose owner Jared Kushner also was interested in bidding, though a source close to Kushner Properties told us recently that he has no idea what he wants to do about a bid right now — we’re guessing nothing):

“Yeah, I might have gone a little too far saying it was a certainty,” he told The Observer. “I was telling the truth, but you don’t know until …”

Until Saturday.