He acknowledged meeting with them, but denied having lobbied them improperly about his family's business interests.

And he denied having made a "crass calculation" about how The Sun's endorsement of Cameron's Conservative party before the 2010 elections would affect News Corp.

Dozens of people have been arrested in criminal investigations into phone and e-mail hacking and police bribery, and police asked prosecutors last week to charge at least eight people.

The suspects include at least one journalist and a police officer, the Crown Prosecution Service said, declining to name them.

No charges have been filed, and the Crown Prosecution Service said it did not know when a decision would be made about charges.

The British government set up the Leveson Inquiry, the independent investigation that summoned the Murdochs, in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal. Two parliamentary committees also are looking into media conduct.

James Murdoch, 39, resigned as chairman of British Sky Broadcasting this month, saying, "I am determined that the interests of BSkyB should not be undermined by matters outside the scope of this company."

Rupert Murdoch testified before lawmakers in July alongside his son.

News Corp. shut down its British Sunday tabloid, The News of the World, last summer after public outrage at the scale of illegal eavesdropping its journalists did in search of stories.

The British lawyer representing dozens of alleged News Corp. phone-hacking victims was in New York last week, exploring options for a U.S. case against the company.

Attorney Mark Lewis said he is representing three or four new clients, one of whom is believed to be a U.S. citizen, who say their phones were hacked while they were on U.S. soil.

There are also many other potential new clients, Lewis said.

"As I've been traveling here," he said, "I've been contacted by many people who've had, so they say, similar problems -- not just hacking but maybe being trailed or have fallen out with some American Murdoch News Corp. company and then found themselves, as they would say, at the wrong end of investigations, the wrong end of information gathered."