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Major changes are afoot in Hollywood, spurred by a pattern of rapid corporate media consolidation.

In June, Warner Brothers, the studio that produced the summer blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, became via a merger with Time Warner. (The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division the vertical merger earlier this year, and the case is now .) We may also see changes as a result of a pending merger between Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox—a merger that stands to eliminate one of the . Comcast had also sought to acquire Fox—before to focus on its , a British pay-TV company in which Fox already owns a 39 percent stake. Comcast .

While these mergers have received critical attention, the conversation has largely ignored something else big: the implications that this media maneuvering may have for diversity in media representation. More specifically, given Hollywood’s historically barbed relationship with onscreen diversity, it makes sense to ask: How might issues of diversity play out in—and affect—the merger review process, if at all? Could it actually make things worse?

First and foremost, it’s impossible to overstate how much this representation matters. Studies indicate that . Disney, Fox, and Comcast already have significant reach when it comes to , especially because these companies own multiple media assets: Disney owns ABC, and Comcast owns NBCUniversal. These companies’ media messages inform not only how children view themselves but also how they see others. While these companies’ diversity track records have improved over time, they nonetheless continue to fumble in their portrayals of characters from traditionally marginalized communities, including women and racial and sexual minorities.

For instance, last year’s remake of Beauty and the Beast was attended by of a feminist reimagining, but that view largely failed to address the fact that the movie “ about the need for women to submit to their assigned husband,” centered around a kidnapping. It may have received justifiable praise for being the , but GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, for its LGBTQ representation overall. Indeed, Disney has a long history of : Ursula from The Little Mermaid, for example, has been criticized for representing the monstrous, embittered lesbian trope and for being modeled after a drag queen. Fox than Disney, having received a “poor” rating from GLAAD in part because while the titular character of Deadpool is openly pansexual, his sexuality is often played for laughs. Meanwhile, Universal Pictures, owned by Comcast, , and was especially lauded for its positive framing of storylines about gay couples in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and Neighbors 2. Even so, the studio obtained an “insufficient” rating.

Media mergers enhance the ability of a small number of companies to dictate the type of content available for audiences to watch.

Disney, in particular, has also mightily to give characters of color any sort of richness or complexity. Consider the crows in Dumbo, who speak African-American Vernacular English and embody racist stereotypes of black Americans as poor and unintelligent. There’s also the titular character of Peter Pan, who uses the derogatory term “redskins” to describe an indigenous tribe. Recent endeavors from Disney to more accurately depict ethnic minorities, well-intentioned though they may be, have still missed the mark in important ways. While making Moana, the company , a panel of experts from the South Pacific—including specialists in fishing techniques and tattoos, ancient navigation, and traditional dance—to serve as consultants. But Maui’s character wasn’t depicted as the lithe teenager he usually is; instead, he was big, “.”

Executive producers may be making these decisions in the past, instead of a responsibility to represent historically marginalized communities accurately. This concern was even present in Fox’s Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures, which tells the story of black female mathematicians’ and engineers’ contributions to the NASA space program. Director and co-writer Theodore Melfi defended the inclusion of a fictitious white savior scene—in which Katherine Johnson’s (Taraji P. Henson) supervisor takes a crowbar to the Colored Ladies Room sign and “desegregates” the bathrooms at NASA—by asserting that it was . Nick Carpou, the former president of domestic distribution for Universal Pictures, has acknowledged that while Hollywood has historically operated on the assumption that films starring black talent have limited appeal, , as demonstrated by the box office success of the studio’s movie Girls Trip last year.

Regrettably, the bid for Sky and Disney’s pending merger with Fox may only decrease studios’ incentives to tell stories that reflect the diversity of modern society. In no small part, that’s because media mergers enhance the ability of a small number of companies to dictate the type of content available for audiences to watch. Disney is poised to become the biggest studio in Hollywood in a move that would reduce the to five, which would also for independent writers, including writers of color and writers from other diverse backgrounds. We need only look to past media mergers for clues about what the future may hold: the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University found that, after the 2011 Comcast/NBCUniversal merger, in frequency.

So, how might we make it such that our art imitates our real-life communities? The path forward isn’t clear-cut, but one place to begin is by subjecting media mergers to review by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Antitrust law doesn’t address onscreen diversity in merger reviews; in fact, diversity isn’t cited at all in antitrust agencies’ . And while the FCC does have a broad public-interest mandate that includes more than just antitrust concerns—such as —the agency’s role in media mergers is limited to only those transactions that involve a transfer of FCC licenses. It’s for that reason that the FCC reviewed neither the AT&T/Time Warner merger nor the Disney/Fox merger.

Looking ahead, this is an aspect of the media-market landscape that ought to change. Media diversity may fall outside the scope of antitrust law, but mergers demonstrably worsen the problem of the lack of onscreen diversity. As a result, it’d be prudent for the FCC to take a more active role in giving the green-light to mergers, regardless of whether or not they involve a transfer of FCC licenses, and scrutinize them under a broader standard that requires the transaction parties to prove that the proposed transaction would serve And as for Hollywood’s refrain that the industry has no financial incentive to produce more diverse movies, that’s becoming increasingly hard to believe, given the high level of market concentration and accumulation of capital.

This isn’t to suggest that FCC review would be a panacea for our diversity woes. Neither am I advocating that the FCC begin regulating content directly. After all, we might meander into dangerous territory if the commission were to have a more explicit say in some of the aforementioned content. Still, it’s high time we re-conceptualize how we can hold media corporations accountable—and we can start by being a bit more critical of how increased consolidation can chip away at the already-thin representation on our screens.