NBC dismissed tiny CBS as too weak to bother buying or destroying

Evidence

The network had long been available to NBC and its boss, David Sarnoff, but it was so tiny (sixteen part-time, low-wattage stations) and NBC so powerful that Sarnoff had written it off as worth neither buying nor destroying. Columbia was an outsider with a limited following, and concerning its first programming, a reviewer in Radio Broadcast was brutal. “Probably not a dozen people in the country, beside ourselves, heard it. No one not paid to do so, as we are, could have survived it.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 338

Categorization

• CANDY: The reviewer line ‘No one not paid to do so, as we are, could have survived it’ is a gloriously deadpan one-liner about a forgettable broadcast.