Lots of hand-wringing at Campaign Desk over Begala and Carville’s new roles with the Kerry campaign (via Andrew Sullivan):

Paul Begala and James Carville, “from the left” co-hosts of CNN’s “Crossfire,” late last week joined the Kerry campaign as advisors — and will be continuing their work on CNN.

There are plenty of pundits practicing today who once upon a time worked for a political campaign or a presidential administration — but concurrently working for a news organization and a political campaign seems an obvious conflict of interest to us.
. . .
By keeping two attack dogs like Carville and Begala on the payroll even after they sign on with the Kerry campaign, the cable network puts that at risk. (Meanwhile, what little alarm has been raised about Begala/Carville’s double employment stint with CNN/Kerry has been strangely muted. Somehow, we suspect there would be more indignant outcry about all this if two Fox News headliners — say Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly — had joined the Bush campaign as advisors, while continuing on at Fox.)

It’s funny that they mention Hannity, since he narrated a video for the GOP Convention while still reporting on the convention for Fox. Carville and Begala’s co-host Bob Novak was allowed to stay on the air and comment on the Valerie Plame affair, despite being at the center of the scandal. In 2000, Fox reporter Carl Cameron covered the election despite the fact that his wife was working for the Bush campaign. Aren’t all these conflicts of interest too?

While I agree with the merits of the charges, I think the format of Crossfire pretty much limits the danger that any conflict of interest would pose. Crossfire is to debate what the WWF is to wrestling. Regardless of the issue, there’s always a heated disagreement. Even if they didn’t work for the Kerry campaign, Begala and Carville would enthusiastically support the Democrats, since that’s their role on the show. I don’t see how advising Kerry would change that for better or worse.