Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 March 2012 06.34 EDT
Hugh Grant claims that Lord Hunt's proposals would be unenforceable. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Actor Hugh Grant has launched another broadside against the press, claiming that new proposals for self-regulation being put forward by Lord Hunt, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, will not work.
Grant said "self-regulation has failed five times" over the past 60 years, and the only solution is to introduce a form of statutory system which will make it legally binding for newspapers to comply with a "code of ethics". Grant denied this amounted to "government control" when interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight on Monday night (interview begins after about 40 minutes).
"It's such an over-simplification to think it's a binary choice of its Zimbabwe at one end and a free-for-all at the other. There are so many gradations in between," he said. Grant, who is acting as a spokesman for Hacked Off, the lobby group which led the calls for an inquiry to the press, met Hunt on Monday to discuss the proposals. Hunt has proposed a new system based around contract law, but Grant said his legal advisers believed this would be unenforceable and that sanctions for breaches of the code amount to nothing.
"Hunt draws parallels with the Premier League. But it's not an exact parallel, because if you breach your contract you are out of that Premier League, it's a huge penalty," said Grant. If you breach your contract as a newspaper you can't be thrown out [of the newspaper industry]." Grant added that he believed Hunt's "heart is in the right place" but his own "legal friends have a lot of doubts" about how the contract system could work.
READ MORE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/mar/27/hugh-grant-press-self-regulation?newsfeed=true
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