Nobody in the United States, Britain, France or Germany is afraid of mad cow disease. BSE was found in all of those countries, where beef is a staple food along with wheat. Even in Canada, where mad cow disease was detected just a month ago, there is no mad cow scare. The only place where people went into a frenzy over mad cow disease is Korea, and the biggest difference between those countries and Korea is the news media.

No national press in the world treats mad cow disease as a major story any more. It is under control and disappearing rapidly. The scientific view that the risk of mad cow disease being transferred to humans is now negligible is gaining acceptance.

But public broadcasters in Korea stoked the mad cow scare on a major scale. MBC’s “PD Diary” led the way by intentionally exaggerating and distorting the facts, and KBS followed suit. The Agora forum played a central role by taking the low-quality ingredients offered by MBC and KBS and mixing them up to create unfounded rumors and spreading them online. Most of the Agora members are said to be former members of progressive and reformist political parties or incumbent members of the DP and the New Progressive Party. Because of the combined efforts of these groups, we ended up witnessing unbelievable scenes, like a 15-year-old student weeping that he was too young to die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease. One foreign economic expert said this was “ridiculous,” while the U.S., European and Japanese media reported the mad cow scare in Korea as something that can only happen in backward countries.

Public networks use public airwaves to transmit their programs. KBS collects fees from the public which are no different from taxes. The staff of these networks dramatized the facts according to their own political affiliations and views and used the public airwaves to transmit such biased reports. This should not happen. But public networks in our country have been engaged in “fanatically” biased broadcasts, as one former high-ranking KBS official confessed. When the DP and Agora members vow to protect KBS and MBC, they are vowing to protect one-sided reporting on mad cow disease, which is a replay of the biased broadcasts that were aired to support former president Roh Moo-hyun when he was threatened with impeachment, and which the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies ruled was the worst case of biased reporting.

The DP and Agora members’ vow to protect the Internet is really an attempt to protect the rights of people to hurl insults, lie, provoke, threaten and terrorize other people and private businesses while hiding behind anonymity.

At the meeting, one Agora member called KBS “elder brother.” It looks like KBS, MBC, Agora and the Democratic Party have banded together in cozy fraternity. By seeing this side of them, the public should be able to gain a clearer picture of the present situation.