Murdoch says he wasn’t responsible for Hacking

Rupert Murdoch told U.K. lawmakers that he wasn’t responsible for the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp. (NWSA)’s News of the World newspaper, saying that the blame lies with the “people that I trusted to run it.’’

"The News of the World is less than 1 percent of our company,” the 80-year-old Murdoch, flanked by his son James, told Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday. He said that he may have “lost sight’’ of the paper because it was “so small in the general frame of the company.’’

The News Corp. chairman’s appearance before the committee, something he refused to do until forced by a summons, is a sign of how much the phone-hacking allegations have damaged the New York-based company’s U.K. operations. In two weeks, the company has closed a profitable newspaper, pulled out of a bid to buy the rest of British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc (BSY), and lost two senior executives.

The hearing was briefly interrupted when a protestor tried to throw something at Rupert Murdoch.

Earlier, as Labour lawmaker Tom Watson quizzed Rupert Murdoch at the start of the hearing, James Murdoch, News Corp.’s deputy chief operating officer, tried to intervene. Many of Rupert Murdoch’s answers were short and came after long pauses. “Nope,” he replied, when asked if he’d been informed of a 1 million-pound ($1.6 million) settlement to a phone-hacking victim in 2008.

“It’s revealing in itself what he doesn’t know, and what executives chose not to tell him,” Watson told James Murdoch, explaining why he was focusing his questions on his father.

Lawmakers focused on legal payments made to the paper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator,Glenn Mulcaire, who went to jail for intercepting phone messages left for members of Prince Charles’s staff.

James Murdoch said he was “surprised” when he found out payments had been made to Goodman and Mulcaire after they had been convicted. He said he didn’t know who had signed off on the payments.

Until “new evidence” emerged in civil cases at the end of last year, the company had relied on findings from the initial police investigation, a probe by the press complaints commission and an outside study by a law firm, Harbottle & Lewis LLP, James Murdoch said. No one had suggested the phone hacking extended beyond Mulcaire and Goodman, he said.