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WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Two Democratic U.S. Senators are pressing for more answers in connection with a News Corp. (NWS, NWSA, NWS.AU) phone-hacking scandal, asking whether a five-member editorial oversight board created following the company's purchase of Dow Jones & Co. raised questions about the executive who was appointed to lead the U.S. company.

The letter, from Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), was sent to the committee that was established in 2007 to protect the editorial independence of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. As part of its agreement to purchase Dow Jones, News Corp. agreed to create a five-member panel to protect Dow Jones's journalism from interference by its new owner and review the hiring and firing of top editors. The panel is led by Tom Bray, the former Detroit News editorial-page editor.

News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. A News Corp. spokesman declined to comment. A Dow Jones spokeswoman also declined to comment. Bray couldn't immediately be reached. Les Hinton, who stepped down last week as the chief executive of Dow Jones, also couldn't immediately be reached.

In the letter, the lawmakers singled out Hinton, whose stint at News Corp.'s News International, whose papers included the now-shuttered News of the World, had come under increasing scrutiny amid allegations about reporting tactics at the newspaper. In testimony in 2007 and 2009, Hinton told a parliamentary committee that News International had carried out a full investigation into the matter and was convinced just one of the company's journalists was involved.

"Did the Special Committee investigate Mr. Hinton's knowledge of alleged criminal activity at News International before or after he was named publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones?" the lawmakers asked. They also asked whether any member of the special committee or other senior Dow Jones executives had expressed "any concerns regarding the hiring of Mr. Hinton given his role in overseeing News International's News of the World when its employees engaged in criminal phone hacking."

In his resignation letter Friday, Hinton said that "in September 2009, I told the Committee there had never been any evidence delivered to me that suggested the conduct had spread beyond one journalist. If others had evidence that wrongdoing went further, I was not told about it." He also said that "when I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated; that important lessons had been learned; and that journalistic integrity was restored."

The committee said in a statement last week that it has had conversations with Dow Jones officials about hacking. It also said that "to date, nothing has come to our attention that causes us to believe" that Hinton's resignation was "any way related to activities at The Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones or that any of the London offenses or anything like them have taken place at Dow Jones. We will continue to monitor the situation closely."

The lawmakers wrote that while they were "pleased to to learn that the Special Committee will take steps to ensure that no illegal activity took place at Dow Jones and Company publications," they were "were surprised that the Committee's statement appears to foreclose any further investigation, despite the fact that the former chief executive officer of Dow Jones and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal served as the top official at News International while illegal phone hacking occurred at its newspapers."

The other members of the panel are Lou Boccardi, the former chief executive of the Associated Press; former Federal Reserve Governor Susan Phillips; former Chicago Tribune publisher Jack Fuller; and Nicholas Negroponte, a one-time Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has spent much of his career focused on digital information.

Rockfeller has previously expressed concern about whether reporting tactics at the U.K. newspapers were imported to the U.S. and whether American phones were hacked, saying he was concerned that hacking may have extended to victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. News Corp. has declined to comment.

In questioning the special committee, the lawmakers said that "this information will help give Americans confidence that the illegal activity that appears to have taken place at News Corporation in the United Kingdom did not spread to News Corporation entities in the United States."

-By Siobhan Hughes, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6654; siobhan.hughes@dowjones.com

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