Rupert Murdoch's company is taking steps to manage the fallout from the phone-hacking affair, but could it be too late?

For an organisation that prides itself on an omnipotent sense of its readers and viewers' hopes and fears, News Corporation's response to the phone-hacking crisis has been remarkable for being so behind the tide.

Rebekah Brooks's resignation should have been accepted when she first apparently offered it, a week ago, instead of making the theatrical and ultimately futile gesture of sacrificing the News of the World.

James and Rupert Murdoch should have accepted the invitation to appear before MPs of the culture, media and sport select committee when it was first issued, instead of waiting to be threatened with a spell in the Tower of London after a dressing down by Speaker John Bercow at the bar of the House of Commons (the torture!).

Even now, with Saturday's apologia in the UK press, it is focused on its problems in Britain when bigger storm clouds are gathering in the US.

Les Hinton, the chief executive of Murdoch-owned Dow Jones, which houses the Wall Street Journal, who was executive chairman of News International when the News of the World was hacking the phones of anyone who found themselves within sniffing distance of a minor news story, faces scrutiny. Hinton's role in the settlements handed out to civil litigants such as Gordon Taylor, the former Professional Footballers' Association chief executive, whose silence over the potential crimes perpetrated against him was secured with a cheque for £700,000, is now being questioned.

Even more seriously, if Hinton is shown to have known about corrupt payments to London police officers, that would be a felony in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Worst of all for News Corp, the FBI has launched an investigation into accusations that NoW journalists asked a former New York police officer for the phone records of relatives of 9/11 victims. If that toxic allegation is shown to have been true, one thing is certain: Fox News is finished. The emotional supercharge of 9/11 in the US is many times greater than Milly Dowler in the UK – and look what happened here. In the US, even Republicans would join the clamour for News Corp to be stripped of the 27 federal licences it holds under the banner of the Fox Broadcasting Company network.

News Corp's US interests are significantly more valuable than its British and Australian operations; if the US business started to crumble, that would surely lead to the break-up of the company. It seems the corporation has belatedly woken up to the seriousness of the situation it faces. It has appointed Edelman, a global communications company that specialises in crisis management, to manage the volcanic-sized fallout on both sides of the Atlantic.

But is it all too late? The credibility of so many senior executives in News Corp is shot. James Murdoch's bid to lead the company after his father is surely in ruins. Rupert Murdoch may reputedly regard Rebekah Brooks as the "daughter he never had", but one of the four daughters he does have, Elisabeth, the smart one who made a soaraway success of her production company Shine, reportedly said the former NI chief executive had "fucked the company" – a report she has since denied.

With UK parliamentary hearings due next week, the hawks circling in the US, and Rupert Murdoch appearing to have lost his legendary sure footing and looking the sum of his 80 years, the prospects for News Corp are looking grim. It must now be a serious prospect that the Murdoch brand has become so toxic that the company will have to be cleansed of the name that made it. The appointment of Tom Mockridge to run NI is the start of that process: expect to hear soon that Chase Carey will step up to the top spot at the global corporation.

One thing is clear: there is much more to come. Commentators have compared the crisis to Watergate; Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter whose revelations helped depose a US president, says it is evident to him the events of the past week "are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event".