This Article is From Jul 20, 2011

Shocked, appalled and ashamed: Murdoch tells MPs probing phone hacking scandal

London: In a grueling afternoon of testimony before British lawmakers, Rupert Murdoch and some of the most senior figures in his family's media empire apologised profusely on Tuesday for the phone hacking scandal that has convulsed public life, even as they insisted they had not ordered or tried to cover up unethical news gathering at their newspapers and were not directly to blame.

It was not clear whether their responses would satisfy skeptical lawmakers, who tried for nearly three hours to discover the extent of the Murdochs' knowledge of events at the heart of the scandal. It exploded two weeks ago with the news that people working for The News of the World, a tabloid run by the Murdoch empire's British arm, News International, had broken into the voice mail of a 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who had been abducted in 2002 and was later found murdered. The firestorm at followed brought Mr. Murdoch down from the heights of influence here to what he called "the most humble day of my life."

Adding to the drama, a protester disrupted the hearing by attempting to hit Rupert Murdoch with a paper plate full of white foam. Mr. Murdoch appeared unhurt, and the hearing resumed after a 15-minute break. (Read: Intruder attacks Rupert Murdoch during hearing on phone hacking)

The disruption happened near the end of nearly three hours of sustained questioning by British lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal, which has raised questions about the behavior of the police, politicians and the media elite in the worst crisis to confront Prime Minister David Cameron.

Mr. Murdoch, who is 80, appeared at the hearing with his 38-year-old son, James, sitting side by side facing their questioners without lawyers at their elbow. Each wore a dark suit, white shirt and tie, though Rupert Murdoch removed his jacket after the foam incident and finished his testimony in shirtsleeves.

After the Murdochs, the committee heard testimony from Rebekah Brooks, who resigned as head of News International last Friday and was arrested and questioned by police on Sunday.

Ms. Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World, insisted that the Murdoch company acted "quickly and decisively" against phone hacking once it had seen new evidence of the extent of the practice in December 2010. She told the committee that while she was editor she employed private investigators, but only for legitimate inquiries, not for hacking and other illicit methods, and she denied paying police officers for information.

At a hearing of the same committee in 2003, Ms. Brooks said her newspaper had paid the police for information - a comment she later retracted.

In a separate development, the BBC reported the existence of previously undisclosed indirect links between figures under investigation in the scandal and Prime Minister Cameron, who has been criticized by the opposition for hiring a former editor of The News of the World, Andy Coulson, as his head of communications.

In a new disclosure that threatened to bring the scandal closer to Mr. Cameron, the BBC said that, in the run-up to last year's elections, Mr. Coulson sought advice from another former News of the World executive, Neil Wallis, who has since been arrested in connection with the phone hacking investigation and had worked for Scotland Yard after he left The News of the World.

The Murdochs spent much of their time before the committee, both before and after the disruption, insisting that while they were deeply sorry over the revelations of widespread unethical practices at their British newspapers, they knew little or nothing about them and had not tried to cover them up. Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, the parent company of the empire, hit those themes again in a prepared statement, originally intended to open the hearing, that the committee allowed him to read aloud at the conclusion of his appearance.

The disruption came after the Murdochs had been in the hearing room more than two hours. A young man in a checked shirt rushed up to Rupert Murdoch, holding a paper plate full of foam that was thwarted by Wendi Deng, 42, Mr. Murdoch's wife, who hurtled herself toward the attacker from her seat behind her husband and appeared to strike the man with the palm of her right hand. Within moments, the man was removed from the committee room by police officers who arrested him, his face covered in foam. His identity or motive was not immediately known.

"Why didn't you see what was happening?" James Murdoch was heard asking the police, British news reports said.

Shortly after the session resumed, Rupert Murdoch was asked by Louise Mensch, a Conservative lawmaker, if he had ever considered resigning.

"No," he said.

Why not? "Because I feel that people that I trusted let me down, I think that they behaved disgracefully," he said. "Frankly, I am the best person to clean this up."

The hearing offered the remarkable spectacle of one of the world's most powerful media magnates under the harsh spotlight of public scrutiny, sometimes seeming unfamiliar with the matters raised by the panel and frequently denying knowledge of them, while at the same time insisting that no one at their company had been "willfully blind."

James Murdoch said he had "no knowledge, and there's no evidence that I'm aware of," that Ms. Brooks or other senior executives who have resigned from Murdoch companies as a result of the crisis had knowledge of phone hacking.

Asked about the departure of Ms. Brooks and of Les Hinton, once Rupert Murdoch's most senior lieutenant, Rupert Murdoch said that both executives asked to leave and were not pushed out. He said he had not accepted earlier offers by Ms. Brooks to resign because "I believed her, I trusted her and I trust her."

"In the end she just insisted," he continued. "She was at the point of extreme anguish."

The hacking scandal was a "matter of great regret of mine, my father's and everyone at News Corporation," James Murdoch told the committee. "These actions do not live up to the standards that our company aspires to everywhere around the world."

Lawmakers questioned Mr. Murdoch senior about news reports suggesting that The News of the World might have sought the phone numbers of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. He said he had "seen no evidence of these allegations."

Often slapping the table to underscore his points as he spoke to the committee, Rupert Murdoch said The News of the World represented about 1 percent of his company's global business. "I employ 53,000 people around the world who are proud, ethical, distinguished people," Mr. Murdoch said.

Rupert Murdoch said he ordered The News of the World shut down two weeks ago because "we felt ashamed of what happened and felt that we would bring it to a close - we had broken our trust with our readers." He denied a suggestion that the decision was made for commercial reasons.

Allegations of phone hacking at the paper had , smoldering for months before the hacking of voicemail of Milly Dowler's voicemail account came to light.

"I was absolutely shocked, appalled, ashamed when I heard about the Milly Dowler case two weeks ago," Rupert Murdoch told the committee on Tuesday.

In his prepared statement, he added: "I would like all the victims of phone hacking to know how completely and deeply sorry I am. Apologizing cannot take back what has happened. Still, I want them to know the depth of my regret for the horrible invasions into their lives."

"I have lived in many countries, employed thousands of honest and hard-working journalists, owned nearly 200 newspapers and followed countless stories about people and families around the world," he said. "At no time do I remember being as sickened as when I heard what the Dowler family had to endure - nor do I recall being as angry as when I was told The News of the World could have compounded their distress."

Later, Ms. Brooks said: "The idea that Milly Dowler's phone was accessed by someone paid by The News of the World, or even worse, authorized by someone at The News of the World, is as abhorrent to me as it is to everyone in this room." Ms. Brooks has denied that she knew about phone hacking at The News of the World while she was editor.

"Clearly what happened at The News of the World, and certainly the allegations of voicemail intercepts of victims of crime, is pretty horrific and abhorrent," she said.

At some points in the hearing when Mr. Murdoch senior was pressed on detailed points and seemed not to have a ready response, his son James sought to intervene, but committee members insisted on answers from his father. At other times, James Murdoch seemed to be shielding his father, sometimes combatively, sometimes disclaiming knowledge, sometimes declining to answer on the ground that many issues were part of separate criminal inquiries by the police.

For his part, Rupert Murdoch, who has a reputation for blunt, tough talk, often answered lawmakers' questions with a long pause and a curt monosyllable.

Sitting behind the father and son were Ms. Deng, Rupert Murdoch's wife, and Joel I. Klein, a senior executive of News Corporation, the Murdochs' global media company, who has been put in charge of an internal investigation of the scandal.

British lawmakers focused some of their questioning on out-of-court settlements paid by News International to people whose phones were hacked. Some of the settlements ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but James Murdoch said such amounts were "below the approval thresholds that would have to go to my father as chairman and chief executive of the global companies." He acknowledged that the settlements were compensation for illegal behavior.

The day of overlapping hearings on the hacking scandal began with testimony from Sir Paul Stephenson, who resigned on Sunday as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as the Met or Scotland Yard.

He was followed by John Yates, the former assistant commissioner who resigned on Monday, and by Dick Fedorcio, the communications director for the police force. Much of the questioning at that hearing, before a different committee of parliament than the one grilling the Murdochs, focused on allegations of coziness between the police and the newspapers and on the hiring of former News of the World executives and journalists by the police either as employees or as consultants.

At the same time, Mr. Cameron cut short an African trade tour to return home for a showdown at an emergency session of the full Parliament on Wednesday with the opposition Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

About 100 protesters gathered on Tuesday outside Portcullis House, a modern addition to the Parliament complex in Westminster where both hearings were held. They held up placards with slogans like "Clean Up Parliament," "Clean Up the Police" and "Clean Up the Press" and called for Prime Minister David Cameron to resign. Referring to the spate of recent resignations at News Corporation and in the Metropolitan Police, they sang the Queen song "Another One Bites the Dust."

The revelations about the hacking of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone prompted their outrage, many said. "I'm the father of a two-year-old girl myself," said Amos Mawditt, 33. "I want to see the Murdoch empire dissolved in this country," he added, because "of the comfortable closeness between the political parties and the police and his newspapers."

Inside the building, whose stately corridors are lined with portraits and busts of famous British politicians, much larger crowds of spectators and reporters gathered than the hearing rooms could accommodate, so several overflow rooms with TV monitors were set up. Unconstrained by the decorum of the hearing room itself, the crowds in the overflow rooms laughed and applauded at Rupert Murdoch's statement that the day was the most humble of his life, and jeered at statements that they took to be obfuscations, notably. James Murdoch's repeated assertion that he "did not have direct knowledge" of particular facets of the scandal.

A number of spectators chased after the Murdochs as they left the hearing room, trying to snap cellphone photos despite restrictions on taking photographs in the building. The elder Mr. Murdoch, looking tired, stared at the floor as he departed, surrounded by a dozen or so advisers and police officers.

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