On Thursday 27 April 2023, at Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Greta Gober, Assistant professor at Warsaw University gave a talk: “Can ‘diversity management as polyphony’ live up to its promise to be a panacea for the epistemological crisis facing contemporary journalism?”
Gober argued that in their book Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young complicate the notion of crises facing journalism, situating concerns about technology and economics alongside chronic issues related to power and structure, focusing on epistemological blind spots, gaps and exclusions (2020). The growing realization that the root causes of media and journalism in crises are epistemological is reflected in the renewal of media organizations’ interest in diversity and inclusion management. Reports from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (approximately since 2019) regularly list ‘diversity’ among the industry’s biggest challenges. ‘Diversity’ (amongst journalists, management, and programming) is seen as a solution to restoring the audience’s trust, improving the quality of journalism, and even ‘saving liberal democracies.
If ‘diversity’ has become a buzzword, the relationship between news media and diverse participation remains vaguely defined and largely underdeveloped in mainstream media and journalism research and education. Based on results from the international Norway-grant funded research project Gober attempted to develop the media diversity and inclusion paradox, i.e., the disconnect between media organizations and newsrooms expressed commitments to ‘diversity’ and the experiences of ‘minority’ journalists working in those places.
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