“AT 2.30 ON TUESDAY 19 JULY, THE STORY THAT HAS SPREAD ITSELF OVER THE NEWS FOR WEEKS will reach one of its most spectacular moments,” writes John Harris in the Guardian. “An elderly American-Australian billionaire and his 38-year-old son will be transported to the Houses of Parliament, along with a 43-year-old woman from Warrington, long used to the company of the rich and powerful, but freshly departed from her high-powered job and just released from a central-London police station. There, they will face a committee of MPs, from a wide array of backgrounds–among them, a trade unionist’s son from Kidderminster; a privately educated chick-lit novelist who has recently married the manager of Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers; and a woman who was once the finance director for the company that makes Mars bars.” [More at the link.] The Wall Street Journal has a clean, effective infographic identifying primary players. Sky News fills out the roster of interrogators. Sky also reports that “Brooks’ Arrest May Demand Ex-Editor’s Silence.”

REUTERS AND BLOOMBERG RAN CONFLICTING STORIES on Monday night about NewsCorp personnel, each citing anonymous sources. Reuters: “The board member and another person familiar with the company’s plans… denied a Bloomberg report that suggested the board is considering replacing [Rupert] Murdoch depending on his performance before the British Parliament committee on Tuesday. The report said the News Corp board met on Monday to discuss replacing Murdoch but both people denied this ‘There was no meeting of independent directors. This board totally supports the top management. We’re united behind him,’ the board member said.” In March, the Los Angeles Times‘ Joe Flint and Dawn C. Chmielewski profiled NewsCorp’s number two, Chase Carey, who figured in Monday’s micro-managing of rumor. LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein compares Murdoch to J. K. Rowling’s Voldemort in a torturous takeout.

WHAT’S IN STORE TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN LONDON? Bloomberg reports James Murdoch will face questions about payments. Forbes’ Robert Lenzner suggests “Rebekah Brooks could find herself in the very same ticklish pickle that DeeDee Brooks, the President of Sothebys found herself in when the government began its investigation of price fixing in the art world.  To ensure she would not be subject to a prison sentence herself, [the prior] Ms. Brooks decided the only course of action was to explain that she was only following the orders of Sothebys’ owner and chairman billionaire A. Alfred Taubman.” MarketWatch‘s Jon Friedman suggests “How Murdoch can satisfy Wall Street”: “Maintaining Wall Street’s confidence will depend on News Corp.’s business accomplishments. Money managers aren’t a sentimental bunch and they care about one thing: numbers. When it comes to investing, they go with their heads, not their hearts. They’ll expect Murdoch to begin the healing process in his address.”

NY TIMES BUSINESS PAGES FIND OPTIMISM in support for the Murdochs from Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley VC and News Corporation independent board member. “Even by recent standards, it was a long day for Rupert Murdoch. The share price of News Corporation dropped another 4.29%, several of his largest newspaper Web sites were hacked and he spent much of his time cramming for his appearance before Parliament on Tuesday to answer questions about the hacking scandal that has engulfed his company and his family… ‘We’ve known about the phone hacking for a long time[,’ Perkins said. ‘]We were told and top management, I’m sure, believed that the early news was the whole story. There’s no reason to believe top management was lying. That’s my very strong belief. We all felt it was inexcusable for sure. We paid some money out, fired some people and we thought we’d fixed it.”

WEBSITES FOR THE SUN and the Times of London, among News Int’l’s remaining papers, were hacked Monday night. The Guardian collects more tributes to Sean Hoare, the former NOTW and Sun journo who was found dead in his home on Monday morning: “Sean Hoare was trying to be honest, struggling with addiction. But he was a good man. My God.”… “An old fashioned Fleet Street character, always in the pub but always with a story.” And the tale Simon Ricketts tells you ought to read: it’s the classical, perfected telling of an old hack helping a new hand with a story handed over “on a plate.” “I shall raise a glass or 12 tonight to him,” Ricketts offers after relating the punchy tale.

NATIONAL PAPER THE AUSTRALIAN, another Murdoch title, was even less kind toward those challenging the company than the Wall Street Journal had been on Monday morning. “These excitable hacks do a grave injustice to the freedom-hungry masses of yesteryear by lumping their struggles in with the media-led agitation against Murdoch,” writes Brian O’Neill. “For no amount of shameless plundering of past democratic moments can disguise the fact that what we are witnessing in Britain is a media coup led by a tiny gaggle of illiberal liberals. This not a mass movement for change, still less is it something akin to the collapse of Stalinism in Europe in 1989. Rather, the anti-Murdoch moral crusade represents the convergence of various minority interests, and the biggest loser won’t be Murdoch but media freedom. So many commentators have allowed themselves to be swallowed by schadenfreude that they have lost the ability to step back and ask: what is motoring this crusade and what will its impact be?”

ONE OUTSIDER’s SUPPOSITION: Eric Boehlert, of Media Matters, who tweeted, “If Murdoch goes, the @nypost will cease to exist. No sane CEO would keep it running in the red.” The Journal’s James Taranto goes on a spirited Taranto-tella against the New York Times and whether or not the WSJ misuses the word “Democrat” (punctilious details at the link): “Joe Nocera, who recently replaced either Frank Rich or Bob Herbert as a New York Times columnist, over the weekend took aim at the competition, writing that ‘The Wall Street Journal has been Fox-ified’ since the December 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. by News Corp., which also owns Fox News Channel. Nocera claims that the news pages of the Journal have undergone a ‘subtle’ and ‘insidious’ change… [F]or Nocera to bad-mouth the competition based on such shoddy evidence is rather a more serious lapse.”

NOCERA WEIGHS  IN, WEIGHTILY, on Tuesday’s NY Times op-ed page: “Although I generally admire entrepreneurs who build giant companies, Rupert Murdoch, despite giving us Homer Simpson, generally has not been a force for good over the course of his long career. His Bill O’Reilly-ed, Glenn Beck-ed Fox News has done a great deal to coarsen the political discourse. His tabloids have lowered the standards of journalism on three continents—and routinely broken the law on at least one of them. He had dumbed down his prestige papers, like The Times of London. He has run roughshod over cross-ownership rules meant to prevent one man or company from having too much power—and then used his lobbying might to get those rules diluted. He has put kowtowing to China ahead of freedom of the press, even killing a book set to be published by his HarperCollins unit that the Chinese authorities objected to. He has consistently used his media properties to reward allies and punish enemies. It’s a long list.”

ALSO AT THE JOURNAL, Bret Stephens compares News of the World’s phone spying to WikiLeaks. “The easy answer is that the news revealed by WikiLeaks was in the public interest, whereas what was disclosed by [NOTW] was merely of interest to the public. By this reckoning, if it’s a great matter of state, and especially if it’s a government secret, it’s fair game. Not so if it’s just so much tittle-tattle about essentially private affairs. You can see the attraction of this argument—particularly if, like Mr. Assange, you are trying to fight extradition to Sweden on pending rape charges that you consider unworthy of public notice… It’s probably inevitable that this column will be read in some quarters as shilling for [Murdoch]. Not at all: I have nothing but contempt for the hack journalism practiced by some of the Murdoch titles. But my contempt goes double for the self-appointed media paragons who saw little amiss with Mr. Assange…”

ROBERT POLLOCK, WSJ EDITORIAL FEATURES EDITOR, cites Fox Broadcasting’s “The Simpsons” as an example of freedom at NewsCorp. “In the early 2000s, pre-Murdoch, I remember sitting on a journalism panel… listening to one of my fellow commenters rant about ‘corporate’ influence on the media. Never, I honestly replied, had I changed as much as a sentence because I felt such influence at the Journal. Would that change when Mr. Murdoch bought us? Naturally many of us were concerned. Everyone knows the Sulzbergers interfere in the New York Times… People who have never worked in large corporations or in government are often inclined to ascribe near magical powers of management to the people who lead them… Most people go about their business in semi-autonomous units, perhaps with a vague notion of pleasing someone distant up the chain of command, but most often with a simple desire to do their best job as they… see it. If you want an example of editorial independence at News Corp., look at how often ‘The Simpsons’ mock their broadcasters at Fox.”

A CALIFORNIA NEWSCORP SHAREHOLDER sues, alleging “gross mismanagement.” The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee considers possible UK political fallout, her article headlined, referring to Labour’s leader: “If Ed Miliband doesn’t flinch, he could well seize the day.” Meanwhile, for Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune, Roger Cohen sees “The Cameron Collapse.” (Cohen’s also found use for that ton of bricks that’s going ’round.) “Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed staggering lack of judgment in hiring Andy Coulson, the former [NOTW] editor, as his first director of communications… a hubristic decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favorable treatment from the 37% of the British print media owned by Murdoch. He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26 meetings with various News Corp. honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested by the British police Sunday. Brooks happened to be part of the Chipping Norton set, well described…. as ‘an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners, located in and around the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency.'”

TUESDAY AFTERNOON’S TESTIMONY BEFORE COMMITTEE convenes in Portcullis Hall next to the Houses of Parliament Tuesday 2:30pm GMT. At this writing, it will be streamed, at least in part, starting 9:30am EDT/7:30am PDT on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN3 and Current. There will be live-blogging, including by, ohno!,  the reliably antagonistic Keith Olbermann.

Monday morning’s “The Hack” is here. Monday afternoon’s “The Hack” is here.

[Fleet Street wood via @SkyNews.]

“The Hack” is an occasional column of media commentary.

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