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No matter what else happens, a select few CBC journalists will always be more equal than other CBC journalists.

That’s the conclusion you’re likely to reach after digesting some eye-opening correspondence from late last week between former long-time CBC correspondent Frank Koller, CBC News Editor-in Chief Jennifer McGuire and her boss, Heather Conway, the public broadcaster’s head of English services.

I urge you to read the emails — which Koller shared with me and are now posted on his website — about the CBC’s cockeyed application of its new and supposedly ‘improved’ paid speaking policy … since the other conclusion you’re bound to draw is that McGuire and Conway have learned zilch from the Jian Ghomeshi scandal that continues to reverberate inside the CBC like a dentist’s drill.

Instead, senior CBC mandarins have been busy rewriting history — to absolve themselves of any measure of meaningful accountability and, perhaps more importantly, to save their jobs in the wake of the tsunami that hit CBC last month courtesy of Jesse Brown and the Toronto Star.

They’re loath to admit it, but Ghomeshi was untouchable and, as such, was never confronted, let alone disciplined, despite loud whispers and at least one formal union complaint that he had routinely sexually harassed a female CBC employee.

In early November, Conway belatedly turned indignant, describing Ghomeshi as “egomaniacal,” “tyrannical,” “demanding,” “moody” and “difficult.” And yet, she and the CBC never reprimanded Ghomeshi because the “egomaniacal” bully was their homegrown star and immune from the kind of career-ending sanctions that would be meted out instantly to regular CBC slugs for committing similar transgressions on the job.

Don’t kid yourself. Ghomeshi isn’t the only CBC star (former or current) who knows full well that he/she operates under a special set of rules — and that an ephemeral celebrity shields them from accountability (unless a blogger or two outside CBC raises the alarm).

That’s also what Koller’s recent exchange with McGuire and Conway confirms. Earlier this year, Koller joined Jesse Brown, the website Press Progress and I in raising pointed questions about the propriety of CBC News personalities — like Rex Murphy and Peter Mansbridge — leveraging their prominent places on the public airwaves to pad their bank accounts via the lucrative speech-for-hire circuit.

You’ll recall that Murphy and Mansbridge were exposed as delivering paid speeches to the oil and petroleum industry — a powerful vested interest they subsequently praised and reported on, respectively.

At first, McGuire and company dismissed the brewing controversy as much ado about nothing much — principally because those doing the exposing and questioning were just the riffraff of the blogosphere.

A list of so-called

‘public appearances’ made by a slew of CBC TV and radio personalities … reveals that a handful of the broadcaster’s stars are still getting paid to make speeches to, or host events organized by, influential and monied interests on which CBC News reports.

As we know, the riffraff ultimately forced CBC to make long-overdue changes to its paid speaking policy late last April. At the time, McGuire insisted that CBC was “tightening” the rules to avoid the conflict of interest charges that triggered the brouhaha in the first place.

While I welcomed the CBC’s tardy move, I remained skeptical of the notion that network brass were engaged in anything more than a PR exercise designed to mollify critics with largely cosmetic changes to its speaking gig policy.

To prove the point, I have, since April, been tweeting links to the list of so-called “public appearances” made by a slew of CBC TV and radio personalities — a list which reveals that a handful of the broadcaster’s stars are still getting paid to make speeches to, or host events organized by, influential and monied interests on which CBC News reports.

Koller, to his credit, went one step further and put his concerns in writing. In his December 11 letter, Koller challenged McGuire to explain how she approved Amanda Lang, Peter Mansbridge, Diane Buckner and Diana Swain “taking money to speak” in November to the Portfolio Managers Association of Canada and Sun Life, Morningstar Mutual Investment Funds, The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and PMI, a private sector organization (with some public partners) dedicated to ‘project management’.

Koller reminded McGuire that “in the new policy announced last April 24, you promised that requests for paid speaking engagements would be rejected: ‘from companies, political parties or other groups which make a significant effort to lobby or otherwise influence public policy, even if the speech or event seems innocuous.’”

“Certainly, with any reasonable reading of this policy and considering the payers involved in the above examples … one would have expected the CBC to have immediately refused permission for its journalists to attend and be paid,” the 30-year veteran CBC economics reporter and foreign correspondent wrote.

Koller is, of course, absolutely right. McGuire, predictably, told Koller that he was wrong — with one high-profile exception.

“When it comes to … speaking engagements, the CBC is 100% living up to the commitments we made … last April,” she wrote Koller on December 12.

McGuire then claimed, absurdly, that not one of the companies, investment firms and corporate associations the CBC stars got paid for speaking to lobbies any level of government about anything.

“None of these organizations makes a significant effort to lobby or otherwise influence public policy,” McGuire wrote. “We feel pretty comfortable judging that a reasonable person would not perceive a conflict of interest when one of our journalists speaks to the Chamber of Commerce.”

I suspect a lot of “reasonable people” — many of whom support the CBC — are convinced that each of the aforementioned paid speaking engagements is a prima facie case of conflict-of-interest.

McGuire conceded that Lang’s paid speech to Sun Life in November did indeed break the network’s ‘revamped’ conflict of interest rules and she assured Koller that such appearances would be banned in the future.

But McGuire went on to explain that she gave the star of The Exchange the green light to “honour her obligation” because she booked the Sun Life speech “months ago.”

How considerate. How hypocritical. Koller was having none of it.

“If you think that these kinds of individual firms and industry associations … do not make ‘make significant efforts to lobby or otherwise influence public policy’ for the direct economic benefit of the individual firms or their members … then you are either blissfully unaware — or worse, willfully blind to the day-to-day workings on an economic and political system that I reported on for CBC for 27 years,” Koller wrote McGuire on December 13.

To date, McGuire hasn’t responded to Koller’s lesson in Conflict of Interest 101.

Oh, and by the way — Rex got paid to speak to the Salvation Army in November.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.