Piers Morgan has been ardently defending Rupert Murdoch as the whole ugly Rupertgate scandal has unfolded, calling him the innocent victim of a witch hunt.

It seems maybe there's a reason for that:

Former tabloid editor Piers Morgan accused media and bloggers of being "lying smearers" Wednesday after a 2009 interview surfaced in which he appeared to admit that hacking phones for reporting purposes was tolerated on his watch.

Morgan, who edited Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World in the mid-1990s and went on to edit rival The Daily Mirror, was asked by the BBC's Kirsty Young how he felt about "dealing with people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people's phones, people who take secret photographs."

Morgan, who replaced interviewer Larry King on CNN this past January, began his answer by saying that "not a lot of that went on," but then acknowledged that newspapers he worked for used information obtained by these methods.

"A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That's not to defend it because obviously you were running the results of their work," he said in an excerpt of the 2009 interview posted on the BBC's website on Wednesday.

"I'm quite happy to be parked in the corner of the tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I make no pretense about the stuff we used to do," he said.