Murdochs Deny That They Knew of Illegal Acts

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 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 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 behavior were endemic at their News of the World tabloid, which is now defunct. Even so, the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks, a former editor at the paper who resigned from the News Corporation on July 15, only to be arrested on July 17 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.” 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.”

Instead of finding a signal that this was the beginning of the end of Rupert Murdoch’s run at the helm of his company, analysts stressed that there was no single revelatory moment during the proceedings. If the Murdochs seemed at times distant, even oblivious, to what was going on in their own company, there were no obvious admissions of wrongdoing or glaring contradictions in their testimony, analysts said. “This was the best day these guys have had in a really long time,” said David Bank, media analyst for RBC Capital Markets. “No shoe dropped, no smoking gun was found, it all sort of sounded kind of contained.”