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.

Nicolle Wallace, who had been the communications director for President Bush’s 2004 campaign and then held the same job in the White House, was an on-air political consultant for CBS News until last month, when she agreed to join the campaign of Senator John McCain.

Alex Castellanos, formerly the top advertising strategist for Mitt Romney, has been a regular guest on CNN’s bipartisan panel on Democratic election nights. Mr. Castellanos is also now an outside adviser to Mr. McCain’s advertising team.

The CNN analyst Paul Begala is a Clinton supporter who works as a consultant to Progressive Media USA, a liberal group that is running attack ads against Mr. McCain. Mr. Begala often sits alongside James Carville, another former aide to Bill Clinton, or Donna Brazile, a Democratic National Committee member and superdelegate.

“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.

There are “Karl Rove-types,” and there is Karl Rove, who helped to define the modern brand of hardball politics and built a new team of Republican operatives, some of them now with the McCain campaign. They include Ms. Wallace and Steve Schmidt, the candidate’s senior strategist.