Ears To The House has repeatedly been told in the past, in public and in private, that we’re too harsh on Resident Advisor. From journalists contacting our editor behind the scenes urging him to go easy on the self-proclaimed “industry leader” to dance music darling Annabel Ross making ridiculous allegations of misogyny, we’ve heard it all before.
We are, of course, not going to do any such thing. A website which proclaims itself to be a leader in its industry is going to get held to a higher standard than everyone else, whether they like it or not. And when their own editor-in-chief is on record as saying she wants to “raise the calibre of music journalism”, we have the right to hold her to this promise.
Which is why we were utterly horrified by the way Resident Advisor reported a story from over the weekend. Yesterday, Ears To The House published details of allegations being made by a Scottish female DJ against James Asquith – which he strongly denies. The so-called industry leader decided to cover this important story too – and here’s how the headline went…
Your eyes really do not deceive you. This was how their report was presented before a social media backlash caused a hasty redraft of the story. Not only do they use the word “refute” in the headline – which actually means to “prove a statement or theory to be wrong”, there’s also the hideously inappropriate photo.
Who on earth in the increasingly big Resident Advisor team thought it was a good idea to have a picture of both the accused and alleged victim leading the story? And which editor signed off the terribly written first draft of the report? Yes, we understand their solicitors will have crawled all over that report with a fine tooth-comb – but the job of an editor is to ensure the final product is readable.
Oh, and to finish off the debacle, not only did they leave comments switched on when sharing the story on social media, they even tagged both Asquith and the alleged victim when posting it on Twitter. For an account with 321,000 followers on the platform to do this was nothing short of irresponsible.
Resident Advisor have apologised on Twitter for their choice of photo, but have declined to elaborate further. Yet again, editor-in-chief Whitney Wei’s personal mission to “raise the calibre of music journalism” at the publication she leads has failed to even get past the starting line…
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