Big Media Pushes Women Off the Air
Last week, Greenstone Media announced it was going off the air.
The women’s radio network was created two years ago as an alternative to traditional radio programs offering “nothing that remotely appeals to women except for nightly love song shows and moldy morning teams.” Greenstone Media aimed to “address the absence of female-friendly talk programming on commercial radio” with programming by and for women.
In a message to listeners, President and CEO Susan Ness suggested that Greenstone’s inability to compete in the radio marketplace was due not so much to the quality of their programs, but to the nature of the media system in the United States. She writes: “We developed fabulous shows, but we were not successful getting station carriage. Perhaps it was because we were ignorantly perceived as being too ‘feminist’ or too ‘political.’ … Or perhaps stations didn’t want to invest the time and resources to enable a new talk format to succeed.”
She points to media consolidation as a key reason that Greenstone failed. “The radio industry is also highly concentrated,” she notes, “and we could not get carriage on stations owned by most of the major radio groups. Our station affiliates were mostly in small markets, making it almost impossible to prove that the concept works.”
The media policies that are at the root of this consolidation are something that Susan Ness knows well, as she was once in charge of enforcing those rules. As a former FCC Commissioner, Ness is deeply familiar with the ways that Big Media have corrupted the policy process, pushing female and minority owners off the airwaves.
In Off the Dial, its landmark study of female and minority radio ownership, Free Press shows how consolidation cuts back the already limited number of chances for women and people of color to become media owners and promote diverse programming.
In a time when women own just 6 percent of all full-power commercial broadcast radio stations, Greenstone Media was a vital experiment designed to open new doors for women in radio. We are sorry to see them go.
