LONDON, (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch called his News of the World tabloid an “aberration”, blaming journalists for hiding a phone-hacking culture from himself, his son James and his protegee Rebekah Brooks, and saying he wished he had shut it down sooner.
Rejecting personal responsibility for a culture that allowed illegality to flourish, Murdoch painted a picture of a rogue culture at the Sunday tabloid, in an echo of his company’s now abandoned defence that a single “rogue reporter” was to blame.
“The News of the World, to be quite honest, was an aberration, and it’s my fault,” the world’s most powerful media mogul said in a second day of testimony in Britain’s High Court on Thursday. “I’m sorry I didn’t close it years before.”
Showing frequent flashes of annoyance as the questioning became more pointed, the 81-year-old admitted he had not paid enough attention to the News of the World but did not accept that he had allowed a culture of illegality to flourish.
“I think in newspapers, the reporters do act very much on their own, they do protect their sources, they don’t disclose to their colleagues what they are doing,” Murdoch told a judicial inquiry into press ethics.
Asked where the culture of cover-up had originated, Murdoch answered: “I think from within the News of the World.
There were one or two very strong characters there who I think had been there many, many years and were friends of the journalists.”
“The person I’m thinking of was a friend of the journalists and a drinking pal and clever lawyer and forbade them … to report to Mrs. Brooks or to James,” said Murdoch, in a thinly veiled reference to the News of the World’s former top lawyer Tom Crone, who has accused James Murdoch of lying.
“Someone took charge of a cover-up, which we were victim to and I regret,” he said.
The inquiry’s top counsel, Robert Jay, picked up on Murdoch admission of a cover-up, causing consternation among Murdoch’s legal team in the courtroom, and forcing Judge Brian Leveson to ask one of the party to sit down before resuming proceedings.
