Hugh Grant calls for EU-wide media regulation
Hugh Grant, the Brit actor who made his name in Hollywood for movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral and About A Boy has taken his fight over Media Law to the EU. He's been meeting ministers in Brussels there to spread the word about his first-hand experience of the British phone-hacking scandal and call for EU-wide media regulation.
He's in town for the today for the very grand sounding Pan-European Forum on Media Pluralism and New Media and last night he had an audience with Neelie Kroes, the EU's top media regulator
Hugh Grant said: "I think anyone who's had his phone hacked - whether it's me or whether it's most importantly some vulnerable person as I said before perhaps, family of someone killed in terrorist atrocity, which has happened in Britain. I think the reaction is the same. It's the one of violation," "It's like finding a burglar in your house and you're naturally angry. But my hope - be for this my campaign over the last year, is not really what to do with me. It's to do with the wider issues of what happened to a lot of innocent people and what happened to our police force and what happened to our government"
Grant says he's happy with the Leveson Inquiry but is worried there'll be a reluctance to carry out any recommendations that come from it. He's calling for regulations on the media which will cover the entire EU for example (and with an eye on Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) a maximum percentage of a newspaper market that a single owner can have in one country.