If you haven't heard, Karl Rove -- once best known as Bush's Brain -- is a pundit for Fox News while also acting as an informal adviser to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. But he's hardly the only ex-politico backroomer showing up on American airwaves.
At times clearly partisan, at others apparently offering down-the-middle analysis, Mr. Rove in his new role as a media star marks another step in the evolution of mainstream journalism, where opinion, “straight news” reporting and unmistakable spin increasingly mingle, especially on television.
George Stephanopoulos’s abrupt move 11 years ago from the Clinton White House to ABC News — initially as a partisan member of a Sunday political panel who would also do some reporting — raised hackles inside and outside the network.
Speaking at the time to The American Journalism Review, the Washington Post columnist David S. Broder complained about what he saw as a worrisome trend. “One day they are calling journalists to write favorably about their prominent political patrons,” Mr. Broder said, “and the next minute they are sitting at the table with journalists and indistinguishable from the journalists.”
This year, there has been hardly a hiccup as the cable news networks and other outlets have sought to stoke interest in the presidential race — already a huge ratings boon — by signing up strategists who have either left politics only recently or still work in campaigns, a detail that is usually shared with the audience but not always.
The article then goes on to name a bunch of pundits/operatives who seem to slip from one side of the fence to the other.
“We have now reached a point particularly in 24/7 cable where it is not the journalist who is the preferred participant, but the politician, the political activist, the Karl Rove type,” said Marvin Kalb, the former director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University who was a correspondent for CBS and NBC.