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Seeking to back its compromised claim that U.S. beef carries the risk of spreading the human form of mad cow disease, “PD Diary” called back the spokesman from the American animal rights group that shot the “downer cow” video footage. The official was bound to repeat the same comments. If the producers of “PD Diary” had a minimum intellectual ability and proper information-gathering skills, they would have known that the most authoritative agency on mad cow disease in the U.S. is the National Institutes of Health. Employing 19,000 researchers and with an annual budget of US$28 billion, the NIH researches the causes and treatments for various diseases that threaten the health of Americans.

If “PD Diary” was even slightly interested in reflecting on the allegations of distortion and exaggeration it faces, or in objectively verifying its claims, its producers should have at least spoken with an expert at a university if they didn’t want to speak to the NIH. But they evaded the foremost U.S. authority on mad cow disease and repeated comments by a layman from an activist group. It was probably because “PD Diary” was afraid of revealing the way it exaggerated and distorted the facts. Moreover, the official with the activist group said he had not even watched the episode of “PD Diary” that caused the groundless mad cow scare in Korea.

The distorted facts and exaggerated footage aired on the program scared young students enough to come out into the streets saying they were too young to die. Yet “PD Diary” feels not a shred of responsibility for what it has done. In the end, the excuses it made were another attempt to fool the public.

“PD Diary” admitted a few “mistranslations,” such as quoting the mother of the dead American woman, Aretha Vinson, as saying she “caught” variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, when she actually said her daughter “might have caught” vCJD. It also quoted Vinson’s mother as wondering “how” her daughter could have caught it, when she actually said “if” she had caught it. But “PD Diary” said those mistranslations were not intentional attempts to distort the facts. In the part of the program where the actual cause of Vinson’s death was being determined, PD Diary intentionally led viewers to believe it was vCJD by changing the words of her mother to sound like her daughter had “caught” the brain-wasting disease. Yet “PD Diary” is saying it neither distorted nor exaggerated the facts. A translator at “PD Diary” said she tried several times to prevent this, but the producers drove ahead with their intentions.

In a brief comment toward the end of the program, the “PD Diary” presenter said the program had erred in claiming that Koreans have a 94-percent chance of catching vCJD if they eat beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease. Citing a thesis by a Korean scientist, “PD Diary” had claimed that Koreans have a higher ratio of so-called “MM” genes than Americans or Britons, so are at greater risk of catching vCJD. Later, that same scientist said “PD Diary” had misrepresented the facts and was wrong to claim that 94 percent of Koreans are vulnerable to the disease. It took PD Diary 70 days to admit this, yet the program’s producers still tried to admit it so nobody would really notice.