Fox News rules cable news, with more than double the audience of CNN. This NYT article looks at how Jonathan Klein, CNN's president of domestic operations, is leading the battle.

An excerpt:

More than a year after Mr. Klein took responsibility for CNN's main network, which is owned by Time Warner, he has taken to savoring small victories like these as he continues to try to chip away at the juggernaut represented by Fox News, a division of the News Corporation.

The ratings contest between the two cable news channels remains hugely lopsided — the 2.05 million viewers that Fox drew, on average, during prime time last year is more than double the 936,000 who watched CNN, according to Nielsen Media Research. To Mr. Klein, those numbers have obscured some of the progress that his network has made on his watch.

And yet, as he embarks on his second year in his job, Mr. Klein continues to struggle with how to define and distinguish CNN in the face of such overwhelming competition.

Last month, for example, he seemed to retreat on one of the earliest campaign promises that he had executed — eliminating the political shoutfests "Crossfire" and "The Capital Gang" — when he hired, as commentators, two conservatives, William J. Bennett and J. C. Watts. Both might well appeal to Fox News viewers, and appeared to have been cast as foils to the Democratic strategists James Carville, Paul Begala and Donna Brazile, who are also on CNN.

Asked in an interview last week if the network was lurching toward a "Crossfire" redux as the midterm Congressional elections approached, Mr. Klein said that it was not, and that the two new commentators would serve as analysts, including for Wolf Blitzer on his program "The Situation Room."

"This is not at all like 'Crossfire,' which was purposely setting left-wingers against right-wingers," Mr. Klein said. "We are simply looking for provocative ideas, as opposed to shouting matches."

When asked if he might be tempted to pit Mr. Bennett and Mr. Carville against each other on Mr. Blitzer's program, Mr. Klein said, "You never say never," adding "but that's not the premise."

Among the reasons some CNN staff members had puzzled over the hiring of Mr. Bennett were his incendiary comments, on his radio show last fall, that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Mr. Bennett had also characterized such a proposal as "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible." Mr. Klein said last week that Mr. Bennett, in responding to the controversy, "had explained himself very clearly and well," and was "a guy who has some very evolved thoughts and is not afraid to express them."

Mr. Klein also sought, in that same interview, to reiterate a point that he has made since the outset of his tenure — that he does not consider Fox News, with its opinion-oriented prime-time schedule, to be his network's main competition. Instead, he said that he operated in a bigger universe that also included Discovery, A&E and even the Weather Channel.

"It's a fool's errand to limit our thinking to one or two other news networks," he said. "We also compete with 'Dancing with the Stars' and 'Skating with Celebrities.' I'll be in a hotel room watching Larry King and my wife calls and says that I have to check out 'American Idol.' "