CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein appeared on a Kalb Report panel at the National Press Club on Monday in a lengthy Q&A about the state of the media. A full transcript can be found here.
Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins writes about the first question from Marvin Kalb to Klein, about the “single most important problem that you face today” at CNN. “Roger Ailes,” responded Klein. “No, I’m kidding. I’m just kidding. Now my PR people are going to be angry at me. I love Roger as a person. I’m being facetious.”
Later in the Q&A, Klein talked about the strategy to focus on hard news. “It takes a while to line your troops up behind that because, keep in mind, that’s a new habit for folks, you know, who had been used to covering stories in a certain way,” he said. “But four years later, we owned television election coverage. We not only beat the other cable networks, we beat the broadcast networks because we devoted ourselves to covering the campaign in terms of the substance of the issues and who were these people and what were they going to do as President? And we studiously tried to avoid the food fight du jour.”