Resident Advisor are a curious lot, aren’t they? Over their 20 years in existence, they’ve got to know the tactic of selective reporting very well. You see it all the time in their news reports from around the scene, particularly on certain subjects. Details that might be considered somewhat awkward are either played down as much as possible or ignored entirely.

And under their new editor Whitney Wei – who is on a self-declared mission to “raise the calibre of music journalism” – this trend looks set to continue. On Tuesday, Resident Advisor reported on the latest protest to take place in the Netherlands. Their nightclubs were closed a few weeks ago now and are currently not due to reopen until November – something which has driven the nightclubs a bit crazy.

The latest of the so-called Unmute Us protests is supposed to have pulled in 150,000 people. But there are a couple of things which seem to be consistently missing from Resident Advisor’s reports on this issue. For example, they don’t explain why nightclubs are closed in the first place. So I’ll tell you – it was because during the two weeks they were open again, infection rates in the country shot through the roof.

Tracing teams established that many of these clusters were coming from nightclubs, so they were closed again. They also conveniently fail to mention that a huge number of promoters and club owners – they don’t like scrutiny, this lot! – are strongly against any kind of Covid regulations whatsoever. The dance music scene has a frightening number of people in it who deny even the existence of the virus – and the Netherlands seems to have numbers which are even more disproportionate to anywhere else.

A news outlet which was truly led by someone who wished to “raise the calibre of music journalism” would seek to report all the facts, then allow their readers to make their own minds up. Instead, they prefer to leave details out which don’t suit their story.

You might want to raise the calibre of music journalism at Resident Advisor first before lecturing the rest of us, Whitney…