London:
It was riveting theater, a newly emboldened parliamentary committee facing off against the 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch, the world's most powerful media mogul, in a series of exchanges designed to get to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed not just Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation, but also Britain's political and law-enforcement elite.
In two hours of intense questioning broken only by a bizarre incident in which Mr. Murdoch was accosted with what appeared to be a foil pie plate filled with shaving cream, both he and his son James declared repeatedly that they had been shocked to discover something that has become increasingly apparent: that phone hacking and other illegal behaviour was endemic at their News of the World tabloid, which is now defunct.
(Read: The man who attacked Murdoch) Even so, the Murdochs and Rebecca Brooks, a former editor at the paper who resigned from the News Corporation on Friday, only to be arrested on Sunday on suspicion of phone hacking and bribing the police, apologized again and again for the failures at their company.
"I would just like to say one sentence," Rupert Murdoch said, breaking at one point into a long answer by his son, the News Corporation's deputy chief operating officer. "This is the most humble day of my life."
(Shocked, appalled and ashamed: Murdoch tells MPs)But his humility did not extend to declaring that he was at fault or that he should step down from his company.
"I feel that people I trusted - I don't know who, on what level - have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it's for them to pay," he said. "And I think, frankly, that I'm the best person to see it through."
While the elder Mr. Murdoch has long had the reputation of being a hands-on manager, pressing for and savouring the scoops scored by the newspapers he had always felt were the soul of his media empire, he said in his testimony that in the case of The News of the World, he had no knowledge of the specifics of what was going on.
He did not know, for example, that his company had paid confidential out-of-court settlements of 600,000 pounds and 1 million pounds to two victims of phone hacking. Nor, he said, did he know that the company was paying the legal fees of Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator under contract to The News of the World who was convicted in 2007 of hacking into the phones of staff members of the royal family.
James Murdoch said he had not known about paying Mr. Mulcaire's legal fees either, and was "as surprised as you are that some of these arrangements had been made."
The Murdochs shut down the tabloid last week in a futile effort to contain a crisis that has also claimed the careers of two high-ranking police officers and two top News Corporation officials, caused the company to withdraw a much-wanted $12 billion takeover bid of a broadcasting company, and led to the arrests of 10 former News of the World editors and reporters.
The hearings (Ms. Brooks appeared separately) provided a gripping spectacle of executives who once commanded unassailable political power enduring sustained questioning from lawmakers enjoying a newfound confidence.
There was Rupert Murdoch, looking every bit his age, appearing at times to lose his concentration and sometimes taking so long to answer questions that he seemed not to have heard them at all. There was James Murdoch, his 38-year-old heir apparent, sharp, engaged and seeming alarmed at the prospect that his father would lose his way, quick to leap in when the elder Mr. Murdoch wavered or appeared uncertain.
Mr. Murdoch's glamorous wife, Wendi Murdoch, 42, sat directly behind her husband in the visitors' section of the hearing room. At one point, a man suddenly rose from his seat and advanced on Rupert Murdoch, striking him with what appeared to be a pie tin filled with shaving cream, or possibly custard. That caused Mrs. Murdoch to rise from her chair and slug the attacker with a swift right swing.
(Read: Who is Wendi Deng Murdoch?)The committee chairman, John Whittingdale, a Consevative member of Parliament, hastily declared a short recess.
The attacker was later identified in British news reports as Jonathan May-Bowles, a stand-up comedian. According to The Guardian, he was sending Twitter messages about the incident. "It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat," the attacker apparently wrote, in a homage to "A Tale of Two Cities," just before unleashing the foam.
He was escorted from the building in handcuffs.
Members of the committee tried their best to get the Murdochs to explain why the company had repeatedly claimed that phone hacking was limited to a single "rogue" reporter. The answer, James Murdoch said, was that he had received bad advice - from his own executives, from the police, from his lawyers, even from the Press Complaints Commission. All had told him, he said, that "there was no illegality," and he said he had no reason to doubt their word.
It was a matter of "deep frustration" and "real regret" that the facts had not emerged sooner, he said.
He added that in 2010, when the company became aware of potential new victims after a flurry of civil cases began bubbling through the courts, "the company immediately went to look at additional records" and turned over the new evidence to the police.
Rupert Murdoch said that as the head of a company with 53,000 employees around the world, he could not have been expected to follow every decision made at The News of the World or even at News International, the News Corporation's British newspaper division.
He said that he generally called the editor of The News of the World once a month to ask "what's doing?" He tends to call the editor of The Sunday Times "nearly every Saturday," he said, but "not to influence what he has to say."
He added: "If there's an editor I'm most in touch with, it's the editor of The Wall Street Journal, because we're in the same building."
Asked a series of questions about specific instances of wrongdoing by former News of the World reporters and editors (most of them since arrested), he looked blank and at a loss. When his son tried to come to his rescue, Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament and a persistent Murdoch critic, waved the younger Murdoch off.
"It's your father who's been in charge of corporate governance at News Corp.," he said. "I will come back to you in a moment."
Jim Sheridan, a Labour member of Parliament, tried to draw out Rupert Murdoch on his relationships with politicians. Why, asked Mr. Sheridan, when he was invited to Downing Street as Prime Minister David Cameron's second visitor after the 2009 general election, did Mr. Murdoch enter through the back door?
"I don't know - I just did what I was told," Mr. Murdoch said.
His son interjected: "I don't think my father had any knowledge of arrangements being made for his entrance or exit from any particular building," James Murdoch said.
After his apparent frailty early in the session, Rupert Murdoch seemed to gain a certain feistiness and combativeness as the hearing went on. He took the opportunity, for example, to make it clear that he had enjoyed a close relationship with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as well as with Mr. Cameron.
"I had also been asked in the back door many times by Mr. Brown," he said.
Both Ms. Brooks and Rupert Murdoch spoke in favour of a free press without government restraint, even as both made it clear that they had suffered a bit at the rough hands of the press themselves in recent days. Ms. Brooks said, for example, that a number of stories making the rounds about her - that she goes riding with the prime minister, that she owns a horse with him, that they share a piece of property - were not true.
For his part, Mr. Murdoch said that he had not really meant to imply, in response to a question earlier in the month, that his main priority in the crisis was the preservation of Ms. Brooks's career. But, he was asked, didn't he point to her and say "that one" when asked the question?
He answered on Tuesday: "I walked outside my flat, and I had 20 microphones stuck in my face, and I don't remember what I said."