Yahoo! News:
Piers Morgan told the committee investigating the U.K. phone-hacking case on Tuesday that he did not have direct knowledge of the practice during his time as a tabloid editor in Britain, but refused to discuss other aspects of his tenure.
“I would say the average editor is aware of about 5 percent of what his journalists are up to at any given time,” Morgan said during testimony via video from Los Angeles.
The CNN host and former Daily Mirror editor acknowledged that private investigators were used by the paper. What were they used for?
“I don’t know, because I was never directly involved,” Morgan — seated at a table flanked by two bottles of Evian and a small stack of books — told the committee. “This was dealt with through the news desk or features desk … Certainly all journalists knew they had to act within the confines of the law. This was enshrined within their contracts–I didn’t have concerns.”
Morgan also dismissed the idea that passages in his 2006 book “The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade” prove he knew about phone-hacking activity while he was an editor.
“Is it a record of 100 percent historical import?” he said. “I would say, ‘No.’”
So his defense is that he a) didn’t know what was going on and b) when he wrote about what was going on, it wasn’t 100% accurate? The rest here.