People News

Hugh Grant criticizes media chieftain Rupert Murdoch

By April MacIntyre Jul 8, 2011, 14:45 GMT

05/09/2011 - Hugh Grant - "Fire in Babylon" European Premiere - Arrivals - Odeon, Leicester Square - London, UK © Landmark / PR Photos

The most shocking news of the week was the implosion of the UK newspapaper, News of the World. Britain's tabloid newspaper was a splashy, tell-all that often times broke stories, but the means to do so is now under fire.

The News of the World allegedly employed unethical methods to hack into the phone messages of a missing teenager who was later found murdered.

Milly Dowler - a 13-year-old who was reported missing in 2002 - is one of several who are the alleged hacking victims of the paper.

Reportedly, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Gwyneth Paltrow and even Prince William were victims too.

News of the World Sunday paper is accused of not just of listening to the missing girl's voicemail, but of deleting messages too. This deletion of voice mails gave her family false hope she was alive still..

On CBS "The Early Show," actor Hugh Grant told co-anchor Chris Wragge this is a pivotal time for the issue.

Grant said, "This is the watershed moment when, finally, the public starts to see and feel, above all, just how low and how disgusting this particular newspaper's methods were. And what will emerge shortly is that it wasn't just this newspaper."

The spotlight is on Rebecca Brooks, then editor of the News of the World at the time of the illegal hacking of Milly's account, and who now runs the Murdoch newspaper empire in Britain. Andy Coulson, who replaced Brooks as editor, went on to head up Prime Minister David Cameron's press office before being forced to resign.

CBS reported that the phone hacking scandal is now tied to the Prime Minister's office. There are also now legal issues about paying the police for information too.

Grant is investigating the man who he says hacked his phone. Grant said on "The Early Show" he talked to a man in a pub as he was doing research for an article he was writing about the hacking issue:

"One of the many interesting things he told me, which I wrote up in an article ... is that it was, in fact, all the tabloid newspapers were very enthusiastic phone hackers," Grant said. "And then he told me some of the even more chilling stuff about the sinister relationship between, particularly, the Murdoch tabloids, news international ones and the Metropolitan Police who were meant to be investigating phone hacking, and basically dragged their feet for a long time. He admitted that money changed hands between the two organizations and he talked about the very unsettling cozy relationship not only between this prime minister and the Murdoch news organization, but basically all our prime ministers going back to Margaret Thatcher, who've all realized they can't get elected unless the man who controls 37 percent of our powerful print media in the country is on their side. And they will go through the humiliating hoops to keep Rupert as their puppeteer."

Grant called this an "enormous national scandal," saying, "The politicians will for sure try to push it into the long grass. They're going to say, 'We'll let the police do their inquiry, and we won't have a proper, full public inquiry in the meantime.' But that's what we need. ... But the politicians, particularly the government, will try to push it into the long grass because they need Murdoch on (their) side. Without Murdoch they're sunk, the end of the government."

Here is the link to listen to Grant's secretly taped conversation with the NOTW reporter:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/04/listen-tapes-yeah-police