The Hollywood Reporter shouldn’t get a pass for publishing yet another Oscar Roundtable featuring all-white actors. Here’s why.

If you’ve seen the most recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter — the industry news magazine that remains one of showbiz’s must-read staples—you’ll note that its cover showcases its annual Oscar Actress Roundtable, one of its best-read and highest profile features of the year. You might also note that, yet again, every performer represented in the Roundtable is white.

To his credit, Stephen Galloway, THR’s editor, did in fact note this himself, and even wrote an editor’s note that’s a mea culpa for the obvious lack of diversity in the issue’s cover story.

But in doing so, he blames the absence of women of color in the package on Hollywood studios for not making more diverse films.

Here’s what really troubles me about this statement. First of all, the power of the media to cover industries and people should be entirely separate from those industries and people by definition. If you see something that’s lacking, the role of the media is to call attention to it in more than just an editor’s note (and one that was apparently written as an afterthought just this morning, after the rest of the issue had been published and the backlash had already begun).

Even if the lack of diversity in Hollywood film is to blame, rather than meekly running an all-white Oscar roundtable again — as in 2014, featuring Patricia Arquette, Laura Dern, Felicity Jones and Hilary Swank and Amy Adams; 2012, featuring Naomi Watts, Helen Hunt, Anne Hathaway, Rachel Weisz, Marion Cotillard, Sally Field and Amy Adams; and 2010, the very first Roundtable cover package, featuring Annette Bening, Helena Bonham Carter, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Hilary Swank and Amy Adams. One might be excused for thinking that women of color are apparently only allowed on the Roundtable every other year — and that Amy Adams (who also appeared on the 2013 cover) has some kind of diabolical hold on editorial director Janice Min, since there have been more Roundtable covers featuring Adams than featuring women of color.

Yes, Janice Min: The editorial director of THR is an Asian American woman, and one of the smartest and most successful in the publishing industry. Min cares about diversity; she has in the past participated in the Asian American Journalists Association, and when interviewed by that organization about Hollywood’s lack of diversity, had this to say: “No one here would ever say, ‘Yes, I am a racist. I’m deliberately excluding people.’ But it is a very white town.”

So the point is not to claim that THR is doing this deliberately. But failing to address this except in a passing sheepish note underscores the degree to which THR is hand-in-glove with its Hollywood subjects. Galloway admits as much:

So how are [Roundtable participants] picked, and when? Often they’re chosen before anyone has even seen their films, when our editors are faced with tough decisions on whom to include and whom to turn down — not to mention juggling the myriad schedules of the far–flung members of the Hollywood tribe. We rely on early buzz from the festivals; word-of-mouth from insiders who may have seen rough cuts of the films; and a calculated guess at which studio is throwing its weight behind whom. Behind every movie and every star is Hollywood’s version of the Koch brothers, battling for their chosen candidates to win.

In short, Galloway states that because the studios put their money behind the white status quo, THR has no choice but to bow to their wishes. It’s equivalent to saying that the cover feature of THR is nothing more than a full-page glossy advertisement. Which may well be true — and at least, if so, Galloway is being somewhat transparent about it.

But if THR truly cared about diversity, and truly wanted to reflect the direction that media and entertainment is headed, whether “Hollywood’s version of the Koch brothers” like it or not, there’s certainly something it could’ve done.

It could’ve run its all-white Oscars Roundtable. And it could’ve also staged and run a counter-Roundtable that featured nothing but well-deserving, diverse actors, deliberately calling out their lack of representation at the Oscars. The print run could’ve been split between the two covers, spotlighting both the absence of diversity and the presence of the white status quo with equal weight, and grabbing hold of the controversy before it invariably erupted.

The media’s job is to start conversations and provoke reaction. Sometimes that means biting the hand that feeds. And in Hollywood, an industry that does more to shape how our society sees itself and how it’s seen by the world than any other, there are a host of hands that would benefit from a wake-up nibble.