Phone hacking: Murdochs and Brooks set to face MPs' questions.....

Rupert Murdoch, son James and Rebekah Brooks face three hours of questions over phone hacking at News International.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, his son James Murdoch, and Rebekah Brooks, until a week ago the three most powerful figures in British media, will on Tuesday face an unprecedented three hours of questions over the extent to which they knew, approved or subsequently covered up widespread phone hacking at News International.

Their confrontation with the culture select committee potentially represents the most severe test of parliamentary authority since the select committee system was established in 1979. It also represents an unprecedented opportunity to cross-examine the normally unchallengeable 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch.

James Murdoch, his chairmanship of BSkyB already in question, will face a make-or-break examination of his professional reputation in which he will have to explain why he authorised payments to cover up illegal phone hacking by the News of the World.

He will also have to answer charges, laid by then Metropolitan police assistant commissioner, John Yates, as recently as last week, that the company refused to co-operate properly with the police between 2006 and 2010.

James Murdoch has admitted that he authorised out-of-court payments to silence the Professional Footballers Association chairman, Gordon Taylor, over the way in which his phone was hacked. He has said he regrets the payments, and was not in full possession of the facts when he authorised them.

It is likely that Rupert Murdoch will offer further apologies for the way in which the families of murder victims had their phones hacked. But he has adopted an erratic stance in the past week, at one point telling the Wall Street Journal that News Corp has handled the crisis "extremely well in every way possible," making just "minor mistakes".

Murdoch said the damage to the company is "nothing that will not be recovered. We have a reputation of great good works in this country." Asked if he was aggravated by the negative headlines in recent days, he said he was "just getting annoyed. I'll get over it. I'm tired."

In another sign of the uncertainty over tone within the company, the Wall Street Journal – owned by News Corporation – ran an editorial on Monday condemning the Guardian for its journalism.

But at the weekend, his British company bought adverts in newspapers to express its abject regrets at what had happened.

News Corp shares have continued to fall in the US and Australia. Murdoch has already been forced to pull out of a complete takeover of BSkyB, and one government minister, Alistair Burt, has claimed he may not be a fit and proper person to hold a broadcasting licence.

The Murdochs will be eager to isolate the crisis as a British media problem common to many tabloids, rather than an international problem specific to the culture he generates in his newspapers.

Brooks's lawyers have confirmed she will attend the select committee hearing, even though she was arrested for 12 hours on Sunday. Her solicitor, Stephen Parkinson, said she was not guilty of any criminal offence.
Parkinson angrily attacked the police for Brooks's arrest, saying she had suffered "enormous reputational damage. They put no allegations to her and showed no documents to her linking her to any crime. In time, the police will have to give their account of their actions, in particular their decision to arrest her with the enormous reputational damage this has involved."

Parkinson added: "She remains willing to attend and to answer questions. It is a matter for parliament to decide what issues to put to her and whether her appointment should take place at a later date."

She will be cross-examined separately from the Murdochs, but the questioning may fall apart if her lawyers insist she cannot answer potentially self-incriminating questions. Brooks has appointed David Wilson, chairman of the public relations agency Bell Pottinger, to act as her spokesman.

Meeting at the same time as the culture select committee, the home affairs select committee will separately grill both Sir Paul Stephenson, the outgoing Met police commissioner, and Yates, the officer responsible for deciding in the space of eight hours that the Guardian in July 2009 had published no new evidence about the scale of phone hacking.

Yates has subsequently admitted at a meeting of the home affairs select committee last week that he made an error in failing to reopen the inquiry, but blamed a lack of co-operation by News International.
Both men are now subject to referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for the way in which they handled the phone-hacking inquiry.

Yates will be questioned over why he failed to tell either the culture select committee or the home affairs select committee that the former deputy editor of the News of the World Neil Wallis had been employed by the Met as a strategic communications consultant. He had been cross-examined in detail in writing and orally by the MPs Tom Watson and Jim Sheridan over his relationship with Wallis, but did not mention the contract.

Watson denies Murdoch will meet his nemesis , saying the session is unlikely to match its advance billing.
"There is not going to be a killer blow on Tuesday. Expectations are way too high," he told the Guardian. "We will get the symbolism of parliament holding these people to account for the first time.
 We will look for facts, and not just offer rhetoric. This story has been like slicing a cucumber, you just get a little bit closer to the truth each time."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/18/phone-hacking-murdochs-brooks-mps