by: Alan Cowell and John F. Burns | The New York Times

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday defended his handling of a contentious and ultimately doomed $12 billion bid by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to take control of Britain’s most powerful and lucrative pay-television network.

Mr. Cameron was speaking in a television interview a day after the long-running judicial inquiry into the cloistered world of Britain’s media barons and powerful politicians produced a new and potentially damaging insight into the internal maneuvering within Mr. Cameron’s government as it considered the bid.