Audience-savvy executives often failed to see new media technologies coming

Evidence

Unlike his rival or early broadcasting’s other important figures, Paley, as mentioned, had no feel for technology, whose future he could barely see into the following week. He never, for instance, understood the potential of FM radio, seeing it merely as a threat to AM. And when it came to television, his myopia would prove prodigious. Seeing the early screens, he assumed they would remain too small to attract home consumers. By the mid-1930s, with television already showing serious potential in Europe, Paley shook his head and succeeded in personally lobbying the FCC to slow it down or block it. Frank Stanton, longtime CBS executive, explained that “Bill did not want television, for he thought it would hurt radio.” At the time, Paley “didn’t see any profit in TV at all.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Sharp parallel to today’s incumbents dismissing disruptive platforms — the man who mastered radio programming actively lobbied to block television to protect radio profits. — connects to: Early internet buzz did not yet translate into commercial success — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 191
• SEED: Essay angle: incumbent platforms lobbied to suppress the next format (radio blocking TV, TV networks’ rejection of cable/streaming) — an early chapter in the history of innovation suppression.
• QUESTION: Worth investigating whether Paley later admitted the television miscalculation, and how his late pivot to TV changed CBS’s fate.

Broader Connections

• Early internet buzz did not yet translate into commercial success #expands (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 191