Rebekah Brooks got involved in a "damage limitation" exercise following the imprisonment of a News of the World reporter in 2007 for phone-hacking related offences out of "loyalty" to News International, the Old Bailey has heard.
She said on Wednesday she had not "one iota of concern from a personal point of view" that she was implicated by the paper's then royal editor, Clive Goodman.
Mr Justice Saunders asked her why she had got involved in a News International initiative to persuade Goodman not to go to an employment tribunal after he was sacked following his conviction for phone-hacking related offences.
Brooks said she thought that when Les Hinton, the then executive chairman of the News of the World publisher, discussed it with her she was "loyal to the company".
She told jurors: "I started from nothing and worked for a company where there were opportunities. It didn't matter where you were from, how you spoke, what school you had gone to. It was a meritocracy. Mr Hinton came from Liverpool, I'm from Warrington, he was northern boy, a mentor figure to me. He told me of a problem and I thought I could fix it."
Earlier the trial heard how Brooks took Goodman out to lunch and offered him a job on the Sun, where she was editor at the time.
Separately on Wednesday, under re-examination by her defence counsel, Brooks told jurors she would have been "very unhappy" if she had been told in 2002, when she was editor of the News of the World, that any of her team had hacked Milly Dowler's phone and discovered a message suggesting she was alive.
She would have been more unhappy if the person who told her was Andy Coulson, her deputy at the time, with whom she has had an on-off affair.
"I can't see one scenario which does not lead me to a conclusion, if you think she's alive, call the police straight away. If someone had told me about it I would have been very unhappy."
Asked by Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, if it would have been any different if the person who told her was Coulson, she said "I think I might have been more angry because I would not have expected it of Andy at all."
Laidlaw said it was the prosecution's case that Coulson did know about the hacking of Dowler's phone but it was not for he or Brooks to make any judgment about that.
Both Brooks and Coulson have pleaded not guilty to the charge that they were involved in a conspiracy to hack phones.
The case continues.
