Journalism faces a profound epistemic crisis, as traditional norms of objectivity fail to address structural power dynamics, exclusion, and institutional blind spots. In response, media organizations have increasingly turned to diversity management, framing newsroom inclusion as a means to restore public trust, improve quality, and democratize reporting. Taking Radio Sweden as a case study, this paper investigates the paradox between institutional commitments to diversity and the lived experiences of minoritized journalists. Over a decade (2010–2020), Radio Sweden conceptualized "diversity as competence" recruiting journalists with non-traditional backgrounds to provide new networks, languages, and critical perspectives, echoing feminist standpoint theory and strong objectivity. However, this framework fractured in 2020 following an open letter signed by 39 current and former journalists calling for a reckoning with systemic racism within the organization. Management responded by reverting to classical notions of absolute objectivity and impartiality, enforcing reporting bans on signatories regarding race-related issues.

Drawing on interviews with journalists who navigated this conflict, I examine how attempts to institutionalize polyphony collapse under structural pressure. I theorize this breakdown through Barbara Czarniawska’s organizational critique of "mirroring" versus "translation" alongside Miranda Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice. I argue that newsroom expectations of "mirroring" assume an impossible, unmediated polyphony. When minoritized journalists attempt to translate local, lived experiences into the "globalized" dominant language of traditional journalism, their perspectives are systematically decontextualized or discredited. This process inflicts both testimonial injustice (credibility deficits and censorship of minority journalists) and hermeneutical injustice (institutional refusal to validate experiences that fall outside traditional metrics, such as a reliance on white-gaze statistics). Ultimately, the paper suggests that resolving journalism's epistemic crisis requires moving away from the utopian ideal of neutral "mirroring" toward an explicit acceptance of ongoing interpretation, translation, and polyphonic negotiation.