News Corp hits at 'partisan' report

A select committee report that found Rupert Murdoch was not fit to run a major company has been condemned as "unjustified and highly partisan" by News Corporation.

The highly contentious investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal caused a split in the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on party lines.

The committee did agree unanimously that its inquiry had been misled by Mr Murdoch's News Corp media empire in a "blatant fashion".

But Tory MPs refused to support the report after Labour and Lib Dems pushed through the finding criticising Mr Murdoch by a vote of six to four.

In a statement, the media mogul's News Corp 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.

"News Corporation regrets, however, 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."

The statement went on: "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.

"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."