[Reader-list] "President Bush is a bad, or inadequate, communicator"

[faiz ullah]

 Media too rough on Bush, says Murdoch

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has told a large audience of business leaders the
press is routinely unfair to George W Bush and the US President does not
seem capable of defending himself.

"I'm a supporter of President Bush but I do believe he's a bad, or
inadequate, communicator," Mr Murdoch told attendees at the Milken Institute
Global Conference in Los Angeles.

The News Corporation chairman and chief executive says Mr Bush is
"persuasive, strong and articulate" in person but "he seems to freeze
whenever a television camera appears".

Motioning to *Wall Street Journal* editorial page editor Paul Gigot, Mr
Murdoch said, "Apart from your newspaper and mine, there's a sort of
monolithic attack on him every day of the year".

News Corporation is the parent company of *The Australian*, *The Daily
Telegraph*, Fox News Channel, the *New York Post* and dozens of other media
assets.

"The atmosphere is absolutely toxic," Mr Murdoch said of the partisanship of
US politics.

"You can't really expect anything to be achieved in the next 18 months and
it's a very serious, sad problem for this country."

Mr Murdoch has also lamented a US populace that he says cannot agree on how
serious a threat militant Islam is and suggested skepticism about the danger
of man-made global warning.

The environment is a long-running theme at the Milken event, now in its 10th
year.

In the past at the event, former US vice president Al Gore has promoted his
message about the perils of global warming and this year, another former
presidental candidate, Senator John Kerry, has done likewise.

But Mr Murdoch says "alleged climate changes" and other problems are far
more manageable than is the threat of Islamic terror, which will worsen
significantly if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

He says Americans need to come together in the "war on terror".

"It's a tragedy that we're not more united," he said.

Mr Murdoch has also praised Internet technologies for helping to usher
individual freedom to places where it is not the norm and lamented the
difficulties he has had in doing business with China, where, "the fact is,
media is pretty much closed".

- *Reuters*
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