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, loc. 338