The public/press distort and misreport all the time. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious there.

"If not, CHANCES ARE there is shadiness occurring".

I used this to nuance and to denote the fact that this is a rule of thumb, not one of the 10 commandments.

A [poor] analogy would be false precision. By stating something in overly specific terms we can communicate something completely opposite of what we mean.

In the case of something like "naughtiness" there's really no decent way to communicate what the author has in mind, not even in an approximate fashion. It's not reducible to a term divorced from the messy details of real-world context. And that presumes what the author has in mind is at all consistent. Better leave it unstated and leave one's actions to speak in their stead.