LONDON — A protester splattered Rupert Murdoch with white foam in a foil pie dish on Tuesday, interrupting a dramatic hearing in which the media baron told British lawmakers he was not responsible for a phone hacking scandal that has rocked his global empire.

Murdoch appeared by turns vague, truculent, sharp and concise as he spoke alongside his son and deputy, James, calling the parliamentary inquisition “the most humble day of my career” but refusing to take personal blame for the crisis that has swept from a tabloid newspaper through the top levels of Britain’s police and even to the prime minister’s office.

Murdoch, 80, said he was “shocked, appalled and ashamed” at the hacking of the phone of a murdered schoolgirl by his now-shuttered News of the World tabloid.

But he quibbled with a suggestion that criminality had been endemic at the tabloid and said he had seen no evidence that victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack and their relatives were targeted by any of his papers.

“Endemic is a very hard, a very wide ranging word,” Murdoch said. “I also have to be very careful not to prejudice the course of justice that is taking place now.”

Murdoch said he was not responsible for the hacking scandal, and denied his company was guilty of willful blindness over hacking.

He laid blame on “the people I trusted but they blame maybe the people that they trusted.”

 

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