Global media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is "not a fit person" to run a major international company, British lawmakers investigating phone hacking at his tabloid News of the World reported Tuesday.

The ruling could prompt British regulators to force him to sell his controlling stake in British Sky Broadcasting, a significant part of his media empire.

The damning report accused Murdoch and his son James of showing "willful blindness" to phone hacking at News of the World, and said the newspaper "deliberately tried to thwart the police investigation" into the illegal activity.

The paper's publisher, News Corp. subsidiary News International, "wished to buy silence in this affair and pay to make the problem go away," the Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee found.

Ofcom, the British media regulator that could force Murdoch out of BSkyB, said it was "reading with interest" the report from Parliament.

The agency noted that it "has a duty under the Broadcasting Acts of 1990 and 1996 to be satisfied that any person holding a broadcasting license is, and remains, fit and proper to do so."

News Corp., which Rupert Murdoch leads as chairman and chief executive, accepted responsibility for some failings Tuesday but pushed back against some of the more critical remarks made by lawmakers.

"Hard truths have emerged from the Select Committee Report: that there was serious wrongdoing at the News of the World; that our response to the wrongdoing was too slow and too defensive; and that some of our employees misled the Select Committee in 2009," it said in a statement.

However, remarks made by some lawmakers after the report was issued on Tuesday were "unjustified and highly partisan," it said.

News Corp. said it had already acted on many of the failings highlighted in the report, had brought in new internal controls and is supporting police investigations into alleged wrongdoing.

Allegations of widespread illegal eavesdropping by Murdoch journalists in search of stories have shaken the media baron's News Corp. empire and the British political establishment, up to and including Prime Minister David Cameron.

Police have arrested dozens of people as part of investigations into phone hacking, e-mail hacking and police bribery, while two parliamentary committees and an independent inquiry led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson are probing the scandal.

Testifying last week before the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch admitted that there had been a "cover-up" of phone hacking at News of the World, which ceased publication last July.

But Murdoch, who owns the Sun and the Times in London, as well as controlling The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Fox News, said his News Corp. had been a victim of the cover-up, not the perpetrator.

"Someone took charge of a cover-up, which we were victim to and I regret," he said Thursday at the Leveson Inquiry.

He apologized for not having paid more attention to the scandal, which he called "a serious blot on my reputation."

Tuesday's report by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is based, in part, on earlier testimony by Rupert and James Murdoch.

John Whittingdale, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that, while there is "no definitive evidence to prove whether or not James Murdoch was aware of ... evidence which indicated that phone hacking was widespread, the committee was nevertheless astonished that he did not seek to see the evidence."

Tom Watson, the Labour lawmaker who has long been one of the fiercest critics of Murdoch, was blistering in a news conference announcing the parliamentary findings.

"These people corrupted our country," he said. "They have brought shame on our police force and our Parliament. They lied and cheated -- blackmailed and bullied and we should all be ashamed when we think how we cowered before them for so long."

But Louise Mensch, a Conservative member of Parliament who is on the committee with Whittingdale and Watson, said the report had gone too far.

She was one of the four Conservative MPs who dissented from the amendment to the report finding that Murdoch was not a fit person to run a company.

She called the amendment "faintly ridiculous," given Murdoch's decades in the business, and accused the Labour members of the committee of pushing through a "nakedly political" statement.

"The amendments were so far out of left field they made a mockery of the whole thing," she said.

The section declaring Murdoch "not fit" passed by a vote of 6 to 4, with support from Labour and Liberal Democrat lawmakers, over opposition from Conservatives. Committee chairman Whittingdale, a Conservative, did not vote.