News Corp is negotiating a settlement with the family of murdered teenager Milly Dowler which will likely cost News Corp and Rupert Murdoch millions of pounds. Even if the class action suit doesn’t materialize, News Corp also has the Justice Department to worry about:

Separately, it emerged that this week US prosecutors at the Department of Justice have written to Murdoch’s News Corporation requesting information on alleged payments made to the British police by the News of the World. The DoJ is looking into whether the company may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

Under FCPA laws, American companies are banned from paying representatives of a foreign government to gain a commercial advantage.

There has been a lot of bad news for the Murdoch’s this month. News Corp is also facing a shareholder lawsuit. The House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee has recalled James Murdoch. News of the World’s former legal manager basically accused James Murdoch of lying in his last appearance before the committee.

As part of a pretaped satirical bit that was to air during the opening of the show, Emmy-winner Alec Baldwin played a fictional network president talking on the phone — and worked in a zinger about Rupert Murdoch listening in. But Fox, which broadcast the show this year, apparently did not find the gag about its parent company amusing. On Thursday, Baldwin tweeted that “I did a short Emmy pretape a few days ago. Now they tell me News Corp may cut the funniest line. #NewsCorphumorlessaswellascorrupt”

That might have had something to do with the Murdoch empire’s exhaustive and continuing phone hacking scandal in the U.K. – a stunning breach of privacy by News Corp that affected not just gossip-page celebrities but the families of soldiers and murder victims.

The joke — and subsequently, the whole bit — were scrubbed, and instead of a little phone-tapping humor to kick off the evening, viewers instead were treated to Leonard Nimoy giving a pep talk to host Jane Lynch. Baldwin confirmed Sunday via Twitter that “Fox did kill my News Corp hacking joke. Which sucks bc I think it would have made them look better. A little.” He also bowed out of attending the show, though he says it wasn’t an act of petulance. Instead, he opted to attend a New York gala for Tony Bennett’s 85th birthday. “I skipped the Emmys… because I wanted to be here,” he told Entertainment Weekly.

Fox, meanwhile, insists that it received no directive from the mothership to ax the joke. Instead, a rep says they cut it because it might be viewed as insensitive to the victims.

That may be so, but it should be noted that other arms of the Murdoch organization have made it abundantly clear that they don’t really see the big deal over a little criminal activity — and don’t take kindly to any sassing back on the subject. Back in July, a “Fox and Friends” segment audaciously declared the criminal scandal a case of “piling on” and noted, with remarkable disregard for the distinction between being a victim and a perpetrator, that “Citicorp has been hacked into. Bank of America has been hacked into. American Express has been hacked into.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, used the indignation over News Corp’s abuse of power as an excuse for an editorial on how all the criticism could “perhaps injure press freedom in general.”

Maybe a light joke about Murdoch eavesdropping would seem in poor taste when so many people have been grievously hurt by the actions of those within his company. Then again, when you’re under the Murdoch umbrella, you’ve already got a longstanding reputation as the entity most likely to take offense at satire and criticism aimed at Murdoch. Or, as Baldwin wrote Sunday on Twitter, “If I were enmeshed in a scandal where I hacked phones of families of innocent crime victims purely 4 profit, I’d want that 2 go away 2.”

“I don’t think Mr. Murdoch had his facts right,” Chapman told lawmakers. “He was wrong.”

Chapman was one of four executives fielding questions from Parliament’s media committee about what they knew and when — and all have already cast doubt on key aspects of the testimony given by the Murdoch family earlier this summer.

The hacking scandal has decimated Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, leading to the closure of its top-selling Sunday tabloid, News of the World, and the arrests of more than a dozen journalists.

It’s also rocked the top levels of Britain’s political and police elite. Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor and until recently one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s top aides, has resigned — as have the two top officers with Scotland Yard. Coulson was one of 15 people arrested.

Media committee chairman John Whittingdale says the latest hearing aims to uncover the truth about a critical piece of evidence, unearthed in 2008, suggesting that voicemail interception at the News of the World was far more widespread than the tabloid claimed at the time.

Questions about who saw the evidence are critical to establishing whether there was an attempt to cover up the scale of illegal behavior at the now-defunct tabloid.

The News of the World stands accused of spying on a host of politicians, celebrities, top athletes, crime victims and even terrorism survivors by systematically intercepting voicemail messages in an effort to get scoops. Allegations of computer hacking and police bribery are also being investigated by Scotland Yard.

The evidence in question was an email carrying the transcript of an illegally intercepted conversation and marked “for Neville” — an apparent reference to the News of the World’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

Because it apparently implicates others in the hacking, the email has the potential to undermine News International’s fiercely held contention that one reporter alone, Clive Goodman, had engaged in phone hacking.

If Rupert Murdoch’s son James knew about the email — and was aware of its implication — it would lend weight to the suggestion that he had approved a massive payoff to one employee in an effort to bury the scandal.

James Murdoch has said earlier that he was not aware of the email at the time, but former News International legal adviser Tom Crone and Colin Myler, a former editor at News of the World, contradicted him in Tuesday’s testimony.

“I told him about the document,” Crone insisted, adding there could be no doubt that “this document meant that News of the World had a wider problem and that we had to get out of it.”

Daniel Cloke, News International’s former personnel director, also contradicted James Murdoch’s contention that he and Chapman had approved the massive compensation awarded to Goodman, the disgraced reporter. One lawmaker has alleged that payment was made to buy Goodman’s silence about the scale of phone hacking at the paper.

Cloke and Chapman said it was Murdoch’s right-hand man, Les Hinton, who signed off on the quarter million pound payout.

Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, was the most senior Murdoch executive to resign in the hacking scandal.

Coulson denied knowing about phone hacking, but resigned from Downing St. in January after police reopened their inquiry into wrongdoing at the paper.

Last month he was arrested and questioned by detectives investigating allegations the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper illegally eavesdropped on the voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians and even murder victims.

The new allegation appears to contradict evidence Coulson gave to Parliament in July 2009, when he said he received no other income after being hired by Cameron.

The Conservative Party said “senior party officials have no knowledge of Andy Coulson’s severance arrangements,” but the opposition Labour Party said Cameron had “serious questions to answer.”

Labour lawmaker Tom Watson told the BBC he would ask the Electoral Commission to investigate whether the payments constituted a hidden political donation, which would violate electoral laws.

The newspaper’s parent company, News International, said it would not comment on individuals’ financial arrangements.

Then on Thursday, U.K. officials arrested a Hollywood correspondent for News of the World. The reporter had worked as the paper’s Los Angeles based editor. That brought the scandal tantalizingly close to U.S. law enforcement, although the Guardian indicated that the alleged misdeeds took place in the U.K., before the suspect had arrived state-side.

Still, the latest news raises a key question: Have the same tricks been used in the United States? Were News Corp.’s U.S. outlets, such as Fox News and the New York Post, involved as well?

So far, no arrests or allegations have been made in connection with these media organizations. But one could be forgiven for having suspicions.

The transgressions at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid have been blamed on a culture of licentious journalism, driven by Murdoch’s voracious appetite for scoop-driven sales. And Murdoch has long pollinated his U.S. media operations with staff plucked from the very U.K. titles now under scrutiny. So who’s to say these trusted cohorts didn’t pack phone-hacking skills along with their valued noses for news?

Indeed, few people seemed surprised when the Daily Mirror (a rival to Murdoch’s Sun tabloid) reported last month that the News of the World — which by this point had admitted to accessing the voicemail of a murdered British schoolgirl — had hacked the cell phones of 9/11 victims.

That dubiously-sourced claim, however, has now largely been discounted, despite an FBI investigation. And observers say there is little likelihood identical crimes were committed on American soil.

Instead, however, News Corp. faces a litany of other accusations in the United States, ranging from credible allegations of computer hacking to the more amorphous charge of “Murdochizing” America through sleazy influence-peddling deals with politicians.

One of the biggest headaches for Murdoch has been the costly claim that News America Marketing, a highly-profitable subsidiary of News Corp., hacked in the computer databases of minor rival Floorgraphics Inc. and stole business strategies and data.

Floorgraphics took News America to court in 2009, but settled mid-trial. The company was then bought out by News America for an undisclosed sum, said to be far in excess of its estimated value.

Another case saw News Corp. shell out $665 million to silence two other rivals, Valassis Communications and Insignia, after they accused News America of abusing its market position in violation of anti-trust laws.

News America’s solution was typical of Murdoch’s pay-your-way-out-of-trouble approach to business ethics, and was emblematic of the wider News Corp. culture, according to media analyst Porter Bibb, a former Newsweek White House correspondent and Rolling Stone magazine publisher.

“Floorgraphics threatened to sue and News Corp. turned around and said ‘don’t sue, we’ll buy your company’ — this is very typical of the approach and philosophy that Murdoch instills throughout the company,” he told GlobalPost.

There are also parallels here with events in the U.K. where News Corp. executives, including Murdoch’s son James, have authorized payoffs to phone-hacking victims (while maintaining they had been unaware it was taking place.)

Likewise, just as Murdoch has tried to resist throwing trusted lieutenants such as former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks to the wolves, News America’s CEO Paul Carlucci not only retained his position but was also appointed publisher of the New York Post.

Such parallels seem to have raised alarm bells. Apparently prompted by the trouble Murdoch faces on the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Justice Department has launched its own investigation into the computer-hacking allegations.

Bibb predicts Murdoch will escape unscathed, just as he has from most of his brushes with U.S. legislators. This persistent immunity, according to journalist Frank Rich, can be attributed to the media mogul’s relentless pursuit of friends and browbeating of foes in high places.

In an article printed last month in New York Magazine, Rich accused Murdoch of “hacking” America not via telephones or computers, but through desensitizing the public to his manipulation of the country’s political morality — what he calls “the Murdochization of America.”

This, he argues, is characterized by the numerous prominent political figures that are now or have once been in receipt of News Corp. pay checks. Fox News, for instance, has counted Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum among regular paid contributors.

Rich wrote: “We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years — and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them — that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics.

Bibb cites the political support Murdoch has relied on when navigating stringent regulations over who can own newspapers and broadcast media in the States. “Murdoch is very famous for buying votes when he needs them,” he said.

As in the U.K. prior to the hacking scandal, Murdoch’s ability to achieve his aims in the U.S. so readily is partly the fault of the wider media community (with the exception of the New York Times) in failing to take him task, Bibb added.

“Murdoch is not the bogey man of a public figure here that he is in the U.K.,” he said. “People are much more hostile towards the right wing politics of Fox News than they are against Murdoch, but that’s not because of anything illegal, just its cultural and political bias.

“People expect it, they say: ‘That’s News Corp., that’s Murdoch — of course he’s going to be extremely right wing, but he’s not breaking any laws.’”