It's not uncommon for network suits to take pot shots at one another during their Television Critics Association press conferences (which leads to subsequent suits being asked for their reaction to what the president of XYZ said about them a few days earlier).

NBC's Jeff Zucker didn't seem particularly combative during his executive session this morning, but he may have simply ceded the aggressor spot to Donald Trump.

Trump came here with Mark Burnett, the "Survivor" producer who's making NBC's "The Apprentice," in which Trump looms large. He claims, despite the glowering he does in the show's pilot, to be "not an angry person."

Which is why it was mildly startling to hear him launch into a diatribe against CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, apropos of almost nothing.

"I've worked with Les Moonves. I think Les Moonves is the most overrated person in television," Trump said.

(Pause here for gasps from the back of the room, where the NBC publicists sit. People who spend their lives finding nice things to say about people they may detest seldom get to use language like "overrated.")

"If Les Moonves was on ["The Apprentice"], he'd have been fired by the third episode," the Donald continued.

Burnett, whose eighth edition of "Survivor," the all-stars show, launches Feb. 1 on Moonves' network, refused, not surprisingly to get drawn in to Trump's hissy fit, which seems to have something to do with CBS' no longer airing Trump's Miss Universe pageant.

"I took Miss Universe away," declared Trump, to whom public image seems all-important, hair aside. "If he does say that he dumped it, remind him that I have his letters" to the contrary.

Whatever.