Murdochs May Face Tough Questions From Leveson Inquiry LONDON - In the protracted saga of Britain's tabloid newspaper scandal, there have been few episodes more challenging for Rupert Murdoch and his son James than the testimony each will give this week at the judicial inquiry that has been holding excoriating hearings for the past five months into wrongdoing at the core of the scandal. The two Murdochs appeared side by side last summer before a parliamentary committee investigating the accusations that have swirled around the two Murdoch-owned tabloids, The News of the World, a weekly that is now defunct, and The Sun, a daily. Much of the questioning on that occasion focused on James Murdoch, then overall head of the family's newspaper interests in Britain, a position he has resigned as his star in the company his father founded has waned precipitously with every new revelation of wrongdoing at the tabloids. Rupert Murdoch, 81, called that appearance last July the "most humble day" of the six decades he had spent building the global media empire he controls through the News Corporation, the New York-based conglomerate that also owns more lucrative properties like the Fox network and the 20th Century Fox studios. But media observers and legal experts in Britain see their appearance before the inquiry, led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, as potentially far more exacting: James Murdoch faces questioning for up to six hours on Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch for a similar period on Wednesday, and possibly for a second session on Thursday. The difference, these experts say, lies in the inquisitorial nature of the Leveson inquiry, which has proved unrelenting for the dozens of witnesses - editors and reporters connected to the scandal, primarily, but beginning this week a parade of the country's principal newspaper proprietors - who have testified under oath, with a television and Internet audience watching. In the experts" view, the parliamentary committee, rigorous as its questioning was at times (one Labour Party lawmaker declared to James Murdoch, "You must be the first Mafia boss in history not to know he was running a criminal organization"), lacked the rigorous research staff and the formidable forensic skills of Lord Justice Leveson and the inquiry's lead counsel, Robert Jay, that have turned the experience of testifying before the panel into one that one witness likened to running a marathon. The Murdochs are expected to face questions running the gamut of their newspapering enterprise in Britain, though the inquiry, by the rules under which it was set up, is not supposed to touch on matters that bear directly on individual criminal investigations that have arisen from the scandal over allegations of phone hacking, payments to public officials and destruction of evidence. Yet few in Britain who have followed Rupert Murdoch's career, which blossomed when he arrived from Australia and made his first venture into newspapering here with his purchase of The News of the World in 1969, are discounting his reputation for fighting back, and even turning the tables on his adversaries, when he is in a tight corner. Although he has since taken American citizenship, he has retained, friends and critics say, the characteristically scrappy, anti-establishment views - and the wariness toward British "toffs" and others who would judge him - that are viewed here as part of the Australian birthright. A weekend article in The Guardian anticipating this week's testimony noted that "Murdoch prefers the bold move - or the shrewdly judged indiscretion - to shift the focus onto competitors and critics." And if anybody thought he might shift to a mode of forelock-tugging apology - that this week might see a rerun of his surprisingly subdued and deferential appearance before the parliamentary committee, with one leading commentator describing him as behaving like a "doddering" old man - Mr. Murdoch has been telegraphing his mood with an almost daily serving of dyspeptic Twitter posts that have cast him in his old pugilistic mode. "Seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels," he wrote on March 28. Matters are somewhat different for James Murdoch. He was summoned before the parliamentary committee for a second round of testimony, centering on what he knew, and when, of phone hacking at The News of the World, which his father closed summarily last summer. Confronted by e-mails that suggested that he had been warned early on of the extent of the hacking, James Murdoch has said that he never read the messages in full, and rejected claims by subordinates that they warned him of the perils facing the Murdoch empire in Britain. Though not among those who have been questioned by the police in the affair, he has effectively abandoned his media career in Britain, and the springboard that was expected at one time to make him the odds-on favorite to succeed his father. One by one, James Murdoch has quit the posts that made him one of Britain's principal media moguls, including the chairmanships of News International, the Murdoch newspaper subsidiary, BSkyB, Britain's leading satellite television network, by far the most lucrative of the Murdoch media properties in the country, and the board that has oversight of The Times and The Sunday Times, the two broadsheet papers in the Murdochs" British stable. He has moved his base to New York, where he remains deputy chief operating officer of the News Corporation, and he has told friends that he is happy to have extricated himself from his responsibilities in Britain. With his father spending much more time in Britain and returning to the newsroom at The Sun to start a Sunday edition, he has said that the businesses in Britain "do not need two Murdochs." But the legacy he has left is one that has imperiled the wider Murdoch operation, and not only because of damage to its reputation. Media analysts have estimated the costs of the scandal, including settlements for hacking victims and the shutdown costs incurred at The News of the World, at upwards of half a billion pounds - equivalent to $800 million - and possibly more. A lawyer for one of the dozens of phone hacking victims who have filed civil suits against the tabloids said last week that Scotland Yard knew of more than 4,700 individuals who were potential targets of the phone hacking, of which more than 1,100 were "likely victims," suggesting that the legal entanglements of the scandal could be a dead weight for years to come.