Why Diversity Should Be a Part of the Media-Merger Conversation

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 the property of AT&T via a merger with Time Warner. (The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division unsuccessfully challenged the vertical merger earlier this year, and the case is now being appealed.) 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 Big Six Hollywood studios. Comcast had also sought to acquire Fox—before dropping that bid to focus on its bidding war with Disney-backed Fox for ownership of Sky, a British pay-TV company in which Fox already owns a 39 percent stake. Comcast ultimately beat Disney in its bid for Sky.

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 children learn and internalize narratives and stereotypes modeled in the media. Disney, Fox, and Comcast already have significant reach when it comes to influencing child development, 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 claims of a feminist reimagining, but that view largely failed to address the fact that the movie “remains a troubling story about the need for women to submit to their assigned husband,” centered around a kidnapping. It may have received justifiable praise for being the first Disney film to portray an openly gay character, but GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, gave Disney a “failing” rating for its LGBTQ representation overall. Indeed, Disney has a long history of relying on the use of queer tropes to depict villains: 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 didn’t score much higher 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, ranked highest among the studios, 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 struggled 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 created the Oceanic Story Trust, 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, “perpetuat[ing] offensive images of Polynesians as overweight.”

Executive producers may be making these decisions based on what’s been popular and profitable in the past, acting in accordance with bottom-line concerns 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 needed for the film’s marketability and overall appeal. 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, times are changing, 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 Big Six studios to five, which would also reduce the number of opportunities available 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, stereotypical depictions of Latinx characters increased 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’ merger guidelines. And while the FCC does have a broad public-interest mandate that includes more than just antitrust concerns—such as diversity of media ownership and diversity of information sources—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 “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” 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.