Former tabloid editor Piers Morgan faced being drawn into the phone-hacking scandal on Wednesday after an interview surfaced during which he appeared to accept that such practices were tolerated on his watch.
Morgan, who edited Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World in the mid-1990s and went on to edit rival the Daily Mirror, was asked by the BBC's Kirsty Young how he felt about "dealing with people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people's phones, people who take secret photographs."
Morgan, who replaced interviewer Larry King on CNN in January, began his answer by saying that "not a lot of that went on," but then acknowledged that newspapers he worked for used information obtained by these methods.
"A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That's not to defend it because obviously you were running the results of their work," he said in an excerpt of the 2009 interview posted on the Daily Telegraph's website on Wednesday.
"I'm quite happy to be parked in the corner of the tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I make no pretense about the stuff we used to do," he said.
Video: Murdoch assesses damage to media empire (on this page)
The phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World has rocked Murdoch's empire, prompting the media baron to close the title, fire top executives and abandon a bid to buy UK broadcaster BSkyB.
After a reporter and private investigator who worked for the paper were convicted and sent to jail for phone-hacking in 2007, the company said the practices were limited to a single rogue employee.
But more victims emerged and the crisis catapulted to a new level earlier in July when The Guardian newspaper reported that the alleged victims included the families of British troops killed in combat and murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Trinity Mirror, the owner of the Daily Mirror, on Tuesday ordered an investigation into whether journalists there also engaged in phone hacking after a former journalist told The Independent the practice was "endemic" at the paper.