The annual News Corporation shareholders meeting has always been a raucous and unpredictable event.

In a 12-minute exchange last year, one disapproving shareholder gave Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, a copy of “Man Bites Murdoch,” an autobiographical book about an editor’s clashes with the media giant, and asked if he would be attending the comedian Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in Washington. Mr. Murdoch said he would be in Australia.

But that incident might seem tame once this year’s meeting ends Friday afternoon in Los Angeles. The gathering is expected to be the company’s most contentious in years, with frustrated shareholders taking the microphone to demand accountability after a phone-hacking scandal in Britain that has embarrassed the company.

Investors will also have the chance to vote on the company’s board members, including Mr. Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan. While the family’s 40 percent stake virtually guarantees they will be re-elected, the chorus of discontent has put the company in an uncustomary defensive position.

The most forceful, and potentially most ominous protest is likely to come from Tom Watson, the British Labour Party legislator who has led the investigation into phone-hacking at News Corporation’s British newspaper unit. Mr. Watson, who acquired nonvoting proxy shareholder status to attend the meeting, said he planned to accuse the company of engaging in further criminal wrongdoing involving surveillance techniques that extend beyond the phone hacking. He did not discuss potential evidence.