James Murdoch puts blame on employees

LONDON — James Murdoch, the son of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and former head of the family’s newspaper outpost here, appeared Tuesday before a judicial inquiry into the ethics and behavior of the British press, blaming his subordinates for keeping him ill-informed about the full extent of hacking at newspapers then under his control.

If he had been informed, he said, he would have ordered the executives to “cut out the cancer.”

James Murdoch was speaking at the start of a remarkable few days in the hearings of the 5month-old inquiry, headed by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, during which Murdoch and his father are set to testify following their joint appearance in July at a separate parliamentary investigation of the same scandal. In some ways his appearance Tuesday, before his father’s testimony Wednesday and possibly Thursday, restated much of the position he took last July, arguing that he had no detailed recall of many of the accusations laid at the door of Murdoch-owned newspapers.

When he took over the family’s British newspaper outpost in 2007, Murdoch said, he was led to believe by underlings that hacking was “a thing of the past” and, he said, responsibility for ensuring that journalistic ethics were observed, particularly at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid at the heart of the scandal, lay with its editor and legal manager.

At that time, news executives in the Murdoch family’s British newspaper outpost, which controls several leading titles, insisted publicly that phone hacking had been limited to the activities of a single “rogue reporter” and a private investigator who had been jailed in early 2007 on charges of intercepting the voice mails of members of the royal family.

Since then, the affair has blossomed.

As he has in the past, James Murdoch said he did not recall in detail many aspects of the scandal that subsequently unfolded and believed that he was not fully briefed on it because, if he had been, “I would say: cut out the cancer, and there was some desire not to do that” on the part of senior newsroom executives.

“There wasn’t a proactive desire to bring me up to speed on these things,” he said.

Oli Scarff / Getty Images James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, leaves court in London after testifying in the inquiry into press ethics sparked by phone hacking.