Prosecutors have indicted five employees from a Korean TV program for distorting facts in a report done on U.S. beef and its risk of mad cow disease.

The five staffers of MBC’s PD Notebook, including four program producers and one writer, were indicted Thursday on charges of defamation and interfering with business.

According to investigators, the program’s host distorted facts during the show that aired on April 29th, 2008, on whether U.S. beef was safe from risks of mad cow disease. Following the airing of the program, candlelit vigils were held for months to protest the government's decision to resume U.S. beef imports.

Prosecutors also determined that some 30 facts were distorted in the process of translating interviews and statements the producers acquired in the United States.

Among the distortions, the program said in a subtitle that an American, Aretha Vinson, died after contracting a human form of mad cow disease, when in fact Vinson’s mother said in an interview that her daughter died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The investigation on the program began last year upon request by the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Meanwhile, producers of the current affairs TV program and their lawyers said Friday that prosecutors are raising issue with minute errors, noting that similar cases of exaggeration or errors by the media in the process of covering issues of public concern have gone unpunished. They called the prosecutors’ move a serious infringement of freedom of the press.

One of the program’s producers, Cho Neung-hee, denounced investigators for unveiling private e-mails of the program’s scriptwriter in the process of probing the case, saying the move violated the writer’s privacy.

In a separate move, former Agriculture Minister Chung Woon-chun and Min Dong-seok, the former chief negotiator of the beef deal, filed a suit against six staffers of the MBC program for defamation in March.