Mr. Murdoch, the company’s deputy chief operating officer and the younger son of its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, was a deft and deflecting witness in July, nimbly parrying lawmakers’ questions while maintaining essentially that he had learned only recently how widespread the hacking problem really was. Now, he will be faced with defending himself against mounting evidence that top executives at News International, the company’s British newspaper arm, knew a full three years ago that hacking was pervasive at The News of the World, the tabloid newspaper that the company shut down in July, and that the executives discussed it with Mr. Murdoch at the time.
“Obviously, there are things which the committee wishes to raise with him, particularly in relation to some of the evidence we have received since he testified,” said John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament and chairman of the committee holding the hearings, the select committee on culture, media and sport.
Mr. Murdoch will also be asked about News International’s behavior after the investigation into its hacking operation intensified. The company acknowledged this week that over the past year and a half, The News of the World had hired a private investigator to conduct covert surveillance of two lawyers representing victims of phone hacking.
The admission was prompted by a report in The Guardian that the investigator, Derek Webb, followed and photographed the lawyers and their families, presumably in the hope of unearthing unsavory information about them and using it to discourage them from pursing their cases.
“While surveillance is not illegal, it was clearly deeply inappropriate in these circumstances,” the company said in a statement. “This action was not condoned by any current executive at the company.”
Mr. Webb told the BBC that he had done such work for The News of the World routinely for eight years, spying on dozens of people, including Prince William; the sports broadcaster Gary Lineker; Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general; Chelsy Davy, Prince Harry’s former girlfriend; José Morinho, the former manager of the Chelsea soccer team; and the parents of the actor Daniel Radcliffe.
“I was working for them extensively on many jobs throughout that time,” Mr. Webb told the network. “They phoned me up by the day or by the night.”
Recently released News of the World documents, some of them obtained by the parliamentary committee from News International’s former lawyers, Farrer Company, show that on June 3, 2008, a lawyer warned company executives in a memo that there was “a powerful case that there is (or was) a culture of illegal information access” at the paper.
The lawyer, Michael Silverleaf, also said there was “overwhelming evidence of the involvement of a number of senior journalists” in the paper’s attempts to illegally obtain information about Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
Mr. Silverleaf’s memo was written at a time when top News International executives, including James Murdoch, were mulling over how to respond to Mr. Taylor’s claim that his voice mail messages had been repeatedly hacked by the News of the World. Mr. Silverleaf counseled them to handle the case privately. “To have this paraded at a public trial would, I imagine, be extremely damaging” to the company, he said.
Even more potentially worrying for Mr. Murdoch is the growing body of evidence that other executives discussed newly discovered details of phone hacking at the paper with him around the same time.
For example, a May 27 note by Julian Pike, a Farrer Company lawyer, says that Colin Myler, the editor of The News of the World, spoke to Mr. Murdoch about Mr. Taylor’s claims and that the two men decided to refer it to outside counsel. Another note two weeks later — after Mr. Silverleaf wrote his damning conclusions — says that after meeting Tom Crone, who was the legal manager of News International at the time, Mr. Murdoch “said he wanted to think through options” about how to proceed in the case.
Several days later, Mr. Murdoch authorized News International to pay Mr. Taylor more than £450,000 ($725,000) and legal fees exceeding $322,000. Mr. Pike has said that Mr. Murdoch personally authorized the amount, in exchange for a pledge of confidentiality, to keep the matter from being made public.
Tom Watson, a Labour member of the parliamentary committee and a persistent critic of News International, said that the panel would question Mr. Murdoch further about the Taylor settlement.
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