Jon Klein Jokes: Roger Ailes My "Single Most Important Problem"

CNN President Jon Klein joked that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes was his biggest problem in an interview conducted Monday by The Kalb Report's Marvin Kalb (via Politico, download transcript here):

MARVIN KALB: Jon Klein, I want to start with you. From your standpoint running CNN, what is the single most important problem that you face today?

JON KLEIN: Roger Ailes. [laughter] 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.

Klein was presumably referring to Fox News' ratings dominance, which has grown during the first months of the Obama administration.

He did go on to answer the question more seriously, discussing the ever-present difficulty of identifying streams of revenue:

Just speaking about systemic business issues, right this moment the problem is the uncertainty about where revenue--

What revenues are going to be. We know where they're going to come from, we have two
streams of revenue so we're fortunate in that respect. But I think the real challenge is the supply of future journalists, making sure that they come our way, because I have no doubt that there are going to continue to be people who want to practice journalism. But the crisis you're speaking of is really one of the business models in crisis. Those are clearly changing. We're never going to have a shortage of folks who want to find things out, and want to tell others about them. And we're not going to have a shortage of people who want to know what's going on. So in that sense, we're all pretty well positioned, we just have to figure out how to take advantage of that.