I posted the following at CTV.ca in the comments area of David Akin's post on the Great Journalists' Contract Hunt initiated by Conservative MP Scott Reid:

The practice could be worrisome if ministers were directing their civil servants to pay journalists to give speeches.

I think most journalists would see giving paid speeches or communications advice to the political arm of government as being problematic.

And if journalists were then donating most of that money back to a party, well, then you'd have yourself a mini-sponsorship scandal! :)

However, if they are speaking to groups of professional civil servants at relatively standard rates of pay once every few years, I'm not sure if there's a budding scandal in that.

Did Reid had clear grounds to think there was a problem, or was he just "goin' fishin'"?
While he has the right to ask the question, if civil servants are spending hundreds of hours trying to answer it, that's hundreds of hours they can't spend on something that might be a bit more pressing.

One could then question whether that's providing good stewardship of the public purse.

On the wider question, there is a debate within journalism today that perhaps transparency should be given more weight when it comes to boosting journalistic credibility.

Here's an excerpt from proceedings of a 2004 Aspen Institute conference:

Conference participants unanimously called for a “presumption of openness” in American journalism—a process through which journalists, media executives, and the public can come together to rebuild trust in the media. Participants urged the field toward as practical a level of transparency as possible in their news organizations, through various mechanisms:

• Strategies for enhancing public knowledge and engagement that demystify journalistic practices and clarify journalistic values,

• Increased opportunities for audiences to “talk back” to journalists, and

• Investments to strengthen newsroom operations and professional performance.
The goal, all participants agreed, is to increase accountability by the media to their various constituencies: sources and subjects of news reports, the public, employees, peers, advertisers, and shareholders.

This blog (and this response) can be seen as part of that process.

Bill Doskoch
CTV.ca News writer

Here's an Online Journalism Review article about that conference.

This 2005 Hypergene interview with Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC's Global News Division, offers some useful insights into thinking at the Beeb.

And there was this perspective from the April-May 2006 issue of the American Journalism Review cover story: Too Transparent?

An excerpt:

Have the news media gone New Age? You can almost hear the hot air seeping from our bloated egos, replaced by groveling apologies and overwrought explanations to our fleeing readers: Let me tell you why I ran that story, made that decision, chose that lead, buried that other story that you, our readers (and bloggers and ideologues and cranks), thought was more important. You can almost see the self-assured cigar smoke dissipating, the Wild Turkey neglected in favor of...healing crystals?

Or, as the healing crystals are known in our business, "transparency." A chorus of media critics, AJR among them, has seized on openness as the panacea to our sullied reputations, the antidote to those cheaters Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley, the tonic to our arrogance that cyberspace loves to hate.

Explaining is all the rage, and that's largely a good thing. From the vice president's hunting calamity to the federal government's communications collapse during Hurricane Katrina, the media demand answers to uncomfortable questions. When officials stonewall, duck questions or try to change the subject, their reticence tends to ignite a media swarm that lasts until someone has apologized and accepted responsibility. It's unfair, even hypocritical, for the media to try to play by different rules, to ignore public demands for accountability that we would insist on from anyone else.

But what exactly should news organizations be open about? Are we trying too hard to explain ourselves, being too needy, wasting too much time on the therapist's couch, with a motley lot of bloggers, partisans and pundits as our Dr. Phil? Is more transparency always better, or are there dangers lurking within an otherwise healthy movement? In short, is the pressure for explaining spiraling out of control?