News Corp. phone hacking: Les Hinton says little new to Parliament

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Les Hinton, a former top News Corp. executive who had oversight over ‘News of the World’ when an editor there was found to have hacked into phones, faced Parliament again on Monday but offered little that differed from previous comments.

The head of News International, the media giant’s European publishing unit, from 1995 to 2007, Hinton reiterated that ‘there was no evidence or suspicion’ that phone hacking at the now-closed News of the World tabloid went beyond Clive Goodman, an editor there who went to jail.

Downplaying his own role in the company’s internal investigation into Goodman, Hinton said via video from the United States that he had ‘a lot of other things to do’ at the time of the probe and that he didn’t think he was ‘less inquiring at the time than I needed to be.”

Hinton, who because of the scandal resigned in July from News Corp., where he had oversight over the Wall Street Journal, said at that time the company’s handling of the situation had seemed adequate.

Last week, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch took heat from shareholders at the company’s annual meeting over his handling of the News of the World fiasco. Murdoch’s youngest son James, who succeeded Hinton as head of News International, has also seen his reputation tarnished by the debacle.

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-- Janet Stobart