My colleague Eric Lipton and I spent a few days trying to tease apart who made the actual decision to give the purchase the go-ahead — “It was as if a magic button had been pushed somewhere. We were all in shock,” said one of the same participants in the deal — but there is no paper trail.

People who worked at the Justice Department back then either could not recollect how the decision was made or declined to share information if they knew.

A spokeswoman for the News Corporation released this statement: “Joel didn’t know Mr. Murdoch at the time of the Heritage Media transaction 14 years ago. A year later, the D.O.J. under his leadership challenged the PrimeStar transaction in which News Corporation had a major interest. Any suggested inference is ludicrous.”

A lawyer who worked in the Justice Department in Washington at the time but did not want to be identified discussing internal matters, said: “This decision was made on the merits. The front office in Washington didn’t think a case could be won in court based on the very narrow definition of the market.”

But in retrospect, the anticompetitive fears of the San Francisco office were well founded.

After the Heritage Media deal, News America Marketing was in a position to throw its weight around and it did just that, drawing a variety of lawsuits in which competitors claimed they had been threatened and harassed. The News Corporation has settled those cases at a cost of over $650 million, and now the F.B.I. is looking into whether there was a pattern of illicit tactics by that division of the News Corporation.

“The way this whole thing got started was a horrible mistake. The government was bamboozled or worse,” said Thomas J. Horton, a law professor at the University of South Dakota who used to work at the Justice Department and represented a competitor, Insignia Systems of Minneapolis, in a lawsuit against News America Marketing. “The company has a long history of behaving unethically with no regard for our system of justice or legal ethics. They are ruthless.”

One of News America Marketing’s other competitors was Floorgraphics, a small New Jersey company that did in-store ads. George Rebh, who founded Floorgraphics along with his brother Richard, met with Paul V. Carlucci, head of News America, in 1999 at a Manhattan restaurant, and the News Corporation executive got right to the point.