Speaking Fee-itis…

As if Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, and Dick Morris weren’t enough scandals for this month…CJR Daily’s Paul Starobin writes about the thorny issue of speaking fees and a new cable news name gets tossed out into “Controversyland”…

Fareed Zakaria, host of the weekly CNN show Fareed Zakaria GPS, has a rate of $75,000, as reported in Harper’s. His general topic on the show is geopolitics, but he has covered Occupy Wall Street and the European financial crisis and interviewed Mohamed A. El-Erian, the CEO of the investment firm Pimco. Over the years, he has been retained for speeches by numerous financial firms, including Baker Capital, Catterton Partners, Driehaus Capital Management, ING, Merrill Lynch, Oak Investment Partners, Charles Schwab, and T. Rowe Price, according to the website of the Royce Carlton speakers bureau.

Zakaria didn’t respond to a request for comment, either, but a CNN spokeswoman said: “We have full confidence in Fareed Zakaria’s professionalism and judgment and do not think his outside speaking appearances interfere with his CNN responsibilities on his weekly show or his commentary on CNN.”

CNN’s rules differ from CNBC’s apparently…according to Starobin…

CNBC, which features wall-to-wall coverage of the financial markets, also has admirably tight standards. If star anchor Maria Bartiromo wants to speak at an event for investors, that’s fine, with permission from her bosses, but she cannot be paid. And this rule applies to events sponsored by any other business interest as well as nonprofits.

And then there’s this about John Harwood…

John Harwood, of CNBC and The New York Times, can attest to the reluctance of journalists to clean up their acts on this front. Back in the mid-1990s, as a Wall Street Journal staffer, he ran for a seat on a committee of correspondents that set the standards for issuing daily press passes to congressional reporters. His sound but un-winning platform: require journalists to disclose sources of outside income, including speaking engagements. His colleagues rejected him for the position.

Speaking fees are “to me more an appearance issue than an actual conflict,” Harwood recently told me, “but nobody should be under the illusion that our credibility doesn’t need shoring up.”