Second Murdoch grilling fails to serve up meaty answers

NEWS INTERNATIONAL chief James Murdoch endured another session of questioning by MPs on the Commons culture committee yesterday. He gave away little new information during the session, in which Labour MP Tom Watson compared him to a mafia boss, but his answers raised uncomfortable questions about our corporate and political culture.  
 
Questions unanswered
At least this time there was no foam pie, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph ­ unless you count the verbal one flung by Tom Watson when he called James Murdoch a “mafia boss”.
 
But the scores of questions asked yesterday really boiled down to one: “Are you a liar or are you simply incompetent?” Murdoch, like a smart politician, apologised, while emphasising that it wasn’t his fault. So after “two and half drainingly repetitive hours” we still don’t know the answer.
 
Mafia jab misses the point
Labour MP Tom Watson may have grabbed the attention with his mafia comment, says an editorial in The Independent. But his comparison “rather misses the point”. If we are to believe Murdoch’s claim that he “was never told, and never asked” whether hacking practices extended beyond one rogue reporter, this would suggest “culpable negligence”.
 
The suspicion is that News International saw its main interests best served by keeping the matter quiet rather than getting to the bottom of it, adds the Independent. This is not mafia behaviour, but “a regrettable strain of modern corporate culture”.    
 
Watson’s attempt at injecting a bit of drama into the dull session with the mafia jibe fell flat, says Alexander Chancellor in The Guardian. Murdoch appeared charmless and shifty, but “what was widely billed as his ‘day of reckoning’ seems unlikely to have either damaged or advanced his prospects in any significant degree”.
 
New International behaviour a disaster
Nevertheless, the answers that emerged yesterday were not flattering for News International, says an editorial in The Times. It seems that the company’s bosses did not ask sufficient questions of their trusted executives, or bring bad news to their bosses.
 
NI’s defensive behaviour and failure to heed its critics has been “a disaster”, adds the editorial. It has led to the resignation of executives and the abandoning of its proposal to buy BSkyB. “The lesson is clear: the company should always be its harshest critic and most assiduous investigator.”
 
Committee not the only ones being misled
You could have roasted a pork joint in the two and a half hours it took the culture committee to interrogate James Murdoch, says Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. “All they finished with was scratchings.”    
 
The committee said this was a further special meeting to investigate whether or not it had been misled. “Sound the Dracula castle organ chords, Igor,” writes Letts. Politicians mislead the public all the time, but when some newspaper manager might have implied something that could be construed as a bit whiffy, they have “neck clutching hysterics”.
 
While James Murdoch’s regret that MPs had been snooped upon was welcome, we must beware reaching a point “where members of a Commons culture committee are immune from any media criticism”. ·