Jon Fried­man has a walk down eth­ics lane today, prompt­ing Ken Auletta to come out with this dis­tinctly non-counter-intuitive take on why eth­ical lapses occur. (And in the words of the song — “Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.”)

“Declin­ing cir­cu­la­tion, fall­ing advert­ising rev­en­ues, and the swoon­ing stock value of tra­di­tional news organ­iz­a­tions, coupled with expand­ing con­sumer choices, prompts slashed news­room budgets.

“This leaves fewer edit­ors and fact check­ers to police news­rooms. Worse, with busi­ness declin­ing, the folks who sign our checks push for more sen­sa­tional stor­ies, more con­flict, more sharp opin­ion — any­thing — to lift their news stor­ies from the clut­ter. The busi­ness cul­ture imposes itself on the journ­al­istic cul­ture. In the con­test between the two cul­tures, busi­ness usu­ally triumphs.”

But is there any evid­ence for a rela­tion­ship between adverse busi­ness con­di­tions and delib­er­ate mis­re­port­ing? If there is I’d like to see it.