For Murdoch Loyalist, Another Stint in the Spotlight

By JEREMY W. PETERS
NYT

In March 2003, a committee of the House of Commons summoned the executive in charge of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers to a hearing and put him on the spot about aggressive tabloid reporting tactics.

“Is it time to clean up your act?” demanded one member of Parliament. Les Hinton, the executive chairman of News International at the time, was indignant in his reply. “Clean up our act? Are you saying we’re dirty?”

With revelations that some within News International’s ranks were not only dirty but criminal, Mr. Hinton is coming under scrutiny for what he did and did not know when he ran the company from 1995 until 2007, the period when the most egregious known examples of voice mail hacking by News International employees took place.

Gerald Kaufman, a member of Parliament who questioned Mr. Hinton at that 2003 hearing, recalled their frosty exchange. “Clearly it was dirty,” he said. “It’s not just I. It’s everybody in British public life who’s saying it’s dirty.”

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