A flap over government payments to Cuban-American journalists in Miami is prompting similar ethical questions about payments Washington reporters receive for appearances on the Voice of America.

Two of the Florida-based journalists were fired last week from jobs at the Spanish-language version of the Miami Herald after it was disclosed that they received as much as $175,000 over a five-year period to work for two anti-Castro outlets funded by the federal government, Radio and TV Marti.

Sums paid to those on VOA are smaller. Journalists who take part in a weekly roundtable discussion, “Issues in the News,”are paid between $100 and $150 a program.

“It’s the same kind of conflict, obviously,” an instructor on journalism ethics, Al Tompkins, said yesterday. “What you’re working for is a part of the government. … There’s a conflict when you receive government dollars, however that money is filtered.”

Mr. Tompkins, who works for a journalism research and training center, the Poynter Institute, said he doesn’t think journalists will change their views over a few hundred dollars. Still, he said, even the appearance of conflict should be avoided.

“It’s not the amount,” Mr. Tompkins said. “We shouldn’t want to have the perception of a conflict at a time when people believe there are conflicts all around.”

A columnist for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain and a longtime moderator of VOA’s “Issues” program, Martin Schram, said he has struggled with the issue of working for the government. “I, and I think every other journalist who has done that show for 40 years or 30 years, I know has pondered the same thing,” he said.

Regular guests on the program have included journalism legends such as Hugh Sidey of Time magazine and Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News.

Mr. Schram said he gives regularly to charity and teaches for free on college campuses but that it would be unrealistic to expect experienced reporters to appear on the show week after week for free. The nominal payments have been unchanged for decades, he said.

“If they wanted us to simply volunteer our time, they wouldn’t have a show,” he said.

VOA’s charter calls for editorial independence, but the organization is overseen by the International Broadcasting Board, the same body that manages Radio and TV Marti.

However, Mr. Schram said he sees VOA as more akin to the BBC than the Cuba-focused outlets. “Their ultimate goal is to get rid of Castro, and they’re very ideological and they’d acknowledge that. I would never go to work for them,” he said.

Another regular panelist on the VOA show, David Lightman of the Hartford Courant, also rejected any comparison with the Cuba-oriented services. “This is nothing like Radio Marti. Nobody at VOA has ever told us what to say or suggested what we should say,” he said. “My view is, I’m a professional. I should be paid for my time. … I don’t just wing it.”

Mr. Tompkins dismissed the comparison of VOA to the BBC, which has a history of brash independence. “I don’t think anybody would accuse the BBC of going easy on the British government,” he said.

Another journalism ethics scholar, Edward Wasserman of Washington & Lee University, said he was not particularly troubled by the VOA payments. More serious, he said, was the alleged failure of most if not all of the Cuban-American journalists to tell their private-sector bosses about the government moonlighting.

Mr. Wasserman, who writes a biweekly column for the Herald, said the flap will help Havana’s propaganda. “Independent journalists writing critically about Fidel are always being branded as propagandists in the pay of the U.S. government,” Mr. Wasserman said. “You have a real problem.”