News Corp. Admits Mistakes Responding to Scandal

Calls parts of report 'unjustified and highly partisan'

By Jon Lafayette -- Broadcasting & Cable, 5/1/2012 1:22:08 PM

RELATED: British Report Calls Rupert Murdoch 'Not Fit' to Lead

News Corp. reacted to a report from a committee of British Parliament by saying some "hard truths emerged," but contending that some of the comments were "unjustified and highly partisan."

The report released Tuesday, based on an investigation into News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, declared that CEO Rupert Murdoch "is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company." It also said he appeared to exhibit "willful blindness" about what was happening in his company.

News Corp. did directly address the accusations against Murdoch in its statement.

The company said "hard truths have emerged from the Select Committee Report:  that there was serious wrongdoing at the News of the World; that our response to the wrongdoing was too slow and too defensive; and that some of our employees misled the Select Committee in 2009."

It added that: "We have already confronted and have acted on the failings documented in the report; we have conducted internal reviews of operations at newspapers in the United Kingdom and indeed around the world, far beyond anything asked of us by the Metropolitan Police; we have volunteered any evidence of apparent wrongdoing to the authorities; and we have instituted sweeping changes in our internal controls and our compliance programs on a world-wide basis, to help ensure that nothing like this ever happens again anywhere at News Corporation."

But it asserted that "the Select Committee's analysis of the factual record was followed by some commentary that we, and indeed several members of the committee, consider unjustified and highly partisan. These remarks divided the members along party lines."

The News Corp. statement concluded that "as we move forward, our goal is to make certain that in every corner of the globe, our company acts in a manner of which our 50,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of shareholders can be justly proud."