I remember when “chequebook journalism” meant paying other people for stories.

Bad enough if sometimes, rarely, justified by those in a much higher pay-bracket than mine, the newsroom chieftains who act as guardians of the media galaxy.

Now it’s the journalists, some, who take the money and run.

Payee: Self.

Payer: Whoever.

Must have been living in a professional vacuum, me, a journalistic bell jar that sealed off the malfeasance and, well, grabbiness that has seized this business, where a whole bunch of high-profile types have been plumping up their salary by charging for speaking engagements.

Peter Mansbridge, who surely doesn’t need to sing for his supper, raking in $28,000 for dropping some pearls of rhetorical wisdom in front of an oil and gas industry group, a gross violation of detachment principles. Fifteen large for Amanda Lang doing her stand-up routine at Mohawk College. A newspaper sports columnist whom I greatly respect divulging a while back that he held the line at two speaking gigs a year — so that made him just a biannual whore — which added $30,000 to his income.

Easy money, I guess. But venal, I say. Like the reporters I’ve known, over the decades, who moonlighted as part-time speech writers for politicians, the same pols they covered in their day jobs.

There’s a vast difference between an on-the-side gig approved by your primary employer — a book, perhaps, or ongoing appearances on an electronic medium platform by print reporters with niche expert knowledge, whether a panel of political pinheads or jock-jockeys on Hockey Night in Canada — and pumping the ego tires on the podium circuit for porky emolument.

Charge for your time? I’d argue the profile boost — which many but not all journalists covet — is payment enough.

Most of this professional code of conduct stuff is self-evident and should be bloody obvious. You don’t prostitute yourself when representing, even indirectly, your employer. You don’t turn into a trollop of oratory because some group is happy to stuff your pockets. Or, even worse, keep mum about blatant conflict-of-interest transgressions — personal relationships that further compromise those speechifying appearances.

In the case of business correspondent Lang — a woman I know only superficially, from time spent together at the Conrad Black trial some years back, though I quite liked and admired her — accused in a story broken by news website Canadaland of trying to sabotage a colleague’s story involving RBC Royal Bank.

Lang is in a romantic relationship with a member of the bank’s board and has given speeches at events sponsored by RBC. Lang has denied either trying to kill the story, withholding her relationship with Geoffrey Beattie — they’ve been very public and social as a couple — or receiving remuneration from RBC for speaking engagements. Lang argued her corner in a gobsmackingly disingenuous column published in the Globe and Mail.

But the entanglement with RBC and Beattie, that’s just a complicating knot inside a conundrum. The romance is of marginal consequence; appearing to shill for your leg-over’s company just plain dopey.

It’s the broader intertwining of journalism and stand-up performance, of journalism and profiteering, which leaves me bewildered.

Bewildered that CBC culture was so bereft of principles that only on Thursday — after the Lang story blew up in their faces — did they declare their on-air journalists (the “talent,” oy) would no longer be permitted to make paid appearances.

The mumbo-jumbo-speak of news honcho Jennifer McGuire’s comments to the Star boils down basically to this: They didn’t do anything wrong, but since people now know about it they aren’t going to do it anymore.

There’s endless talk of ethics in journalism, with conflict of interest a vital part of that discussion. I’ve always drawn a distinction between ethics and integrity, which the CBC, among others, fails still to grasp: Ethics is doing the right thing when people are watching; integrity is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.

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The CBC is attempting, belatedly, to impose professional ethics on its “talent.” It’s shocking to me that journalists at the top of their profession need to be hand-held through this aha light-bulb turning on. I’d always assumed reporters were pretty smart cookies and, if not particularly virtuous — thank God, pedants not welcome — at least principled in the stark black/white areas.

Easy for me to say, perhaps: Rosie don’t talk. No amount of money would entice me towards public speaking.

Grudgingly, I did a handful of radio and TV interviews, as demanded by my contract, to promote a book a couple of years ago. Once, in a management headlock, I spoke to a university audience on behalf of the Star, which actually encourages this kind of thing through its own speakers’ bureau.

Everything else — TV, radio, community groups, campus organizations, women’s agencies, legal fraternities — is a polite “thanks but no thanks.” I’m strictly a print girl and have more than enough space, more than enough platform, to convey my thoughts in the pages of the Toronto Star. In debt till the day I die, doubtless, but still wouldn’t take the blah-blah bounty.

And not only me but just about everyone I know in this business, unless they’re keeping their sweetheart deals on the deep down-low.

The other night I was out for sushi with two great dames in the journo biz: CTV anchor Lisa LaFlamme and Post columnist Christie Blatchford. Both do occasional speaking ops. In fact, Lisa had earlier that day been in Ottawa addressing a university newspaper students’ association.

Neither has ever taken a penny for these appearances. On those occasions where a sponsoring group insists on giving a fee — to satisfy their own protocols — Lisa and Christie direct the money to a designated charity.

We don’t get Lang. We don’t get anchor Leslie Roberts, suspended from Global and then resigning after the Star disclosed his part-ownership of a public relations firm whose clients regularly appeared on Global programs, sometimes to be interviewed by Roberts.

This isn’t quantum physics. It is neither an intellectually complex nor morally thorny issue.

Just dollars and sense — and a nickel’s worth of integrity.