Linking from public website to intranet: are staff an audience?

We get a lot of requests to link to our intranet from our public website. For example, the media releases section has a link to the intranet page for the media management team, basically so they can easily find their internal site.

Do you think this is acceptable? The intranet is a bin fire, but I'm reluctant to solve its navigation problems by adding intranet links to the public site.

The argument I've had with people is that staff are also an audience of the website, and so they should be able to access links.