“No, I did not,” Mr. Murdoch said after a committee member asked him if he had, in fact, given misleading evidence. Wearing a blue suit and sporting the red lapel poppy that many Britons wear to commemorate those who have fallen in battle, Mr. Murdoch seemed combative and self-assured, repeatedly denying that he had been given evidence of “wider spread phone hacking” at a crucial meeting in 2008.
At one point, a committee member, Tom Watson, compared the Murdoch media empire to a mafia family bound together by a vow of silence — omertà. Mr. Murdoch replied with a pained expression, calling the comparison inappropriate.
Mr. Murdoch was a deft witness in July when he appeared before the parliamentary committee investigating the phone hacking scandal that was riveting the country. Sitting alongside his 80-year-old father, along with family members and legal representatives at that time, he deflected lawmakers’ questions, maintaining that he had learned only recently how widespread the hacking problem really was.
On Thursday, he returned alone to Parliament to a more skeptical panel, faced with trying to defend himself against mounting evidence that he and top executives at News International, the company’s British newspaper arm, knew three years ago that hacking was not limited to a single rogue reporter jailed a year earlier, but was pervasive at The News of the World, the tabloid newspaper that the company shut down in July.
As the hearing began, and Mr. Murdoch was again invited to revisit his earlier testimony, he asked to comment about his father’s remark to the July hearing that he had been humbled by the affair. “I think the whole company is humbled,” James Murdoch replied, saying he was “very sorry” and adding that he wanted to ensure that such events “do not happen again.”
Much rides on how Mr. Murdoch, 38, handles the lawmakers’ questioning, including his personal credibility and the health of the News Corporation media empire. The hacking scandal has tarnished the corporation, rocked its stock price, cost it a $12 billion deal for the takeover of the satellite giant British Sky Broadcasting, and added to strains between Mr. Murdoch and his father. At least 16 former employees of The News of the World have been arrested, and a series of executives up the corporate ladder — including the publisher of The Wall Street Journal Europe, Les Hinton — resigned.
Beyond his own fate and that of his company, Mr. Murdoch’s answers may add to details to a scandal that has reached deep into British society, raising questions of intimate and self-serving ties linking the media, the political elite and the police.
The panel is now armed with recently released News of the World documents related to a case central to the doubts about Mr. Murdoch’s earlier testimony: that of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association. In 2008, after Mr. Taylor claimed that his voice mail messages had been repeatedly hacked by the tabloid, Mr. Murdoch authorized News International to pay him more than £450,000 ($725,000) and legal fees exceeding $322,000.
Whether Mr. Murdoch knew the hacking accusations to be true is a central focus for the panel as it seeks to determine whether his prior testimony misrepresented what he knew about illegal activities at News of the World and when he knew it.
In his July testimony, Mr. Murdoch maintained that the episode had done nothing to alter his understanding that a single reporter, Clive Goodman, the former royal reporter at The News of the World, had engaged in phone hacking in 2007.
On Thursday, he said that “no documents were shown to me or given to me” at a crucial meeting in 2008, but he was given “sufficient information” to authorize an increase in the payment to Mr. Taylor.
“The meeting, which I remember quite well, was a short meeting, and I was given at that meeting sufficient information to authorize the increase of the settlement offers that had been made,” he said. “But I was given no more than that.”Regarding the settlement, Mr. Murdoch said in July that he had been given an oral briefing on the case and “did not get involved directly” in the negotiations. He denied that the settlement was motivated by a desire to keep the matter from becoming public, but rather a pragmatic one, meant to avoid damages and legal costs from a judgment at trial. He declined to discuss releasing Mr. Taylor from the agreement’s confidentiality clause.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1c280327c29e194645f397d7841c1e73
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