Murdoch Offers Reassurances to Sun Newsroom LONDON - In his 60 years in the newspaper business, few moments could have been as charged for Rupert Murdoch as the one on Friday when he visited the London headquarters of his British newspaper arm, News International, where reporters and editors at the Sun tabloid were in a state of ferment against him and his executives. With the raids, the focus of the scandal rocking Mr. Murdoch's media empire - and Britain's police force - shifted somewhat from the accusations of illegal cellphone hacking by some News International reporters that have dogged his corporation for months. The fact that the names of the Sun employees and their sources had been given to the police by a special committee appointed by Mr. Murdoch that reported directly to his News Corporation headquarters in New York set off a furor in the newsroom of the Sun, Britain's highest-circulated daily newspaper. Mr. Murdoch, who is 80, met those charges in a characteristically direct manner, flying to London on his corporate jet on Thursday and going straight to the headquarters of his British newspaper operations in London on Friday morning. After distributing an email message to Sun staff that combined an unapologetic defense of the company's cooperation with Scotland Yard in the bribery and phone-hacking scandals with reassurances about the future of the Sun, he strolled through the tabloid's newsroom greeting individual staff members. Mr. Murdoch told Sun employees that News International will be starting a new Sunday tabloid, the Sun on Sunday, "very soon" that will aim at capturing many of the readers lost with the demise of the News of the World, closed because of the hacking scandal. "Our duty is to expand one of the world's most widely-read newspapers and reach even more people than ever before," he said, according to a copy of a letter, provided by News Corporation, that he distributed to some staff in the form of an email. Concerns for the Sun's future had been heightened by the shuttering of his other British tabloid, the weekend News of the World, at the cost of nearly 200 newsroom jobs. Like the Sun, the News of the World was hugely profitable, and served with the Sun as the financial mainstay of the two up-market titles in the Murdoch newspaper stable in Britain, the Times and the Sunday Times, both of which run at heavy losses. In effect, any move to close the Sun would have imperiled all three titles, which together occupy a central role in British newspapering. Mr. Murdoch also told the tabloid's employees that he had ordered the lifting of the suspensions of all newsroom staff who have been arrested "until or whether charged" and said the corporation would cover their legal expenses. "Everyone is innocent unless proven otherwise," he said. Senior Sun staff members, including Trevor Kavanagh, the paper's associate editor, had spoken up angrily after the weekend arrests. He accused Mr. Murdoch and his executives of engaging in a "witchhunt" against reporters and editors at the Sun by passing names of possible miscreants to Scotland Yard, and, in effect, of being handmaidens to the scenes that developed on Saturday when police squads raided the homes of the five Sun employees - among them the deputy editor, the deputy news editor, the chief reporter, the chief foreign correspondent, and the photo editor. Accounts of the raids circulating among Sun employees spoke of the police swooping in at dawn, rousting children from their beds and ripping up floorboards. The raids prompted a barrage of accusations by reporters and editors that the Murdoch hierarchy was sacrificing individual employees in a bid to protect wider company interests. In his e-mail, Mr. Murdoch was staunch in his defense of the role played by the company's management and standards committee, which has been working with company-appointed lawyers to work through 300 million emails from the archives of the Sun and the News of the World, looking for any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. He noted that he had owned the Sun for 43 years, and said that the arrests of Sun employees was "a source of great pain for me, as I know it is for each of you."