The BBC Must Stop Inaccurate “Dateline London” and Bernard Burrell!

Radio Jamaica Limited is taking the unusual step of making a public demand for the British Broadcasting Corporation to stop the inaccurate and damaging association of Mr. Bernard Burrell with our organisation. It is out of sheer frustration that we take this unusual step with a colleague media entity. However, it has been more than a year now since Radio Jamaica has been trying to get the BBC Television programme to cease erroneously identifying Mr. Burrell and his comments as being associated with our company.

Mr. Burrell who is often shown as “Correspondent – Radio Jamaica has not been associated with Radio Jamaica for a decade, yet he continues to appear on the BBC programme giving the world the impression that he has some connection to our strong RJR brand of integrity. During the unrest in London in August 2011 he made comments which cause many Jamaicans to cringe with how uninformed they were. Then Radio Jamaica also made unsuccessful attempts to get the BBC to halt the inaccurate association of Burrell with RJR.

In the most recent appearance, seen on BBC World on Saturday morning January 7, 2012, Mr. Burrell makes statements to the effect that Jamaica has never really had a good Prime Minister. That may very well be his usually uninformed view, but it is not a view supported by Radio Jamaica and especially not a view supported by our editorial department, with which Mr. Burrell’s title on the programme purports to associate him.

Radio Jamaica has again tried to make contact with the management of the BBC directly and have again been unsuccessful in getting a response to our correspondence. The company had asked the BBC Caribbean Service to assist us in making contact, long before it closed its operations, and that was unsuccessful. Efforts were made through the Commonwealth Broadcasters Association to also make contact to right this wrong, but with no success.

If this giant of international media, the BBC, does not care about the destruction of a small broadcaster’s reputation through their ignoring of our requests and the continued facilitation of uninformed, damaging and baseless comments, then we will have no option but to take to the newspapers and other news sources in the United Kingdom to get a basic truth recognised by the BBC.