Most people start a business to make a profit, and that’s what probably drove the owners of Inglewood Today to form an extraordinarily close merger with the City of Inglewood.

For a couple of years between the late 1990s and the turn of the century, nearly a third of the publication was actually prepared by Inglewood city staff. The paper featured articles from various city departments along with a prominently featured column titled “The Mayor Speaks” from then-Mayor Dorn. These articles advanced the mayor’s opinion on various voting measures. The ethics and legalities of using taxpayer money to advocate a political position was simply ignored by both the City of Inglewood and Inglewood Today.

Now I must acknowledge to having first-hand experience with rendering services to the city. I was the Executive Director of Inglewood Community Television, and between the years 2002 to 2010 we were contracted to produce and broadcast television programming under the cable franchise agreement with providers such as Time-Warner. Our funding was a combination of Franchise Taxes (5%) and User Utility Tax (8%) and a Community Television grant provided by the waste contract with Waste Management, Inc.

We televised all members of the council and other city-sponsored events. Everything was scrutinized closely to avoid even a “hint” of political advocacy or favoritism, which is how it should be when taxes are being used to pay for the services. However, years later, Mayor Butts blasted local television in a number of editions of Inglewood Today, stating that the $1.6 million the city paid ICTV’s eight-member staff over a 10-year period was excessive. He never mentioned that the money was actually 40% of what each subscriber paid and our mission was to bring added value to sub- scribers’ cable subscriptions. Butts also never mentioned that his former city of Santa Monica spent $11 million during this same 10-year year period for lesser quality programming.

The point is that Butts said whatever he wanted and Inglewood Today did not employ the fundamental journalistic ethic of providing ICTV an opportunity to rebut his misstatements.

In 2003, the cozy merger between the city and Inglewood Today came to the attention of the Fair Political Practice Commission (FPPC).

The FPPC first sent a warn- ing letter each to the city and Inglewood Today’s owner, Willie Brown. They were told to cease and desist their financial relationship. Neither the city nor Brown complied.

Within a year the FPPC sent another letter stating that the City of Inglewood and Inglewood Today were in violation of state law. The result: a $50,000 fine.

The language in Brown’s contract stated that he would comply with all FPPC rules and regulations. He didn’t. So the council voted to pay the $50,000 fine with the taxpayer’s money.

One can imagine which council person voted “No” in an attempt to make Brown personally pay for his FPPC fines.

Nevertheless, Mayor Dorn saw that Inglewood residents paid the bill for the initial theft of taxes used to pay for the content and printing of Inglewood Today.

Thereafter, the council majority found another way to provide tax dollars to Brown.

No longer would the city pay Inglewood Today for “city-prepared pages.” Now the city would simply pay a higher than usual fee to advertise various public notices, and Inglewood Today would create “news” by publishing their own opinions—which consistently coincided with those of the mayor-dominated city council-majority!

So does Inglewood Today really want to print the news? For example, what about when the council chamber was packed with angry union members who were losing their jobs at the Hollywood Park Casino, union members who pleaded with council members Stevens and Judy Dunlap for help—all while the Butts-led council majority simply ignored them? Did Inglewood Today dare to print how Mayor Butts went to Sacramento on the taxpayer’s dime to lobby for the new casino operator who had just fired 150 union employees?

If those are not news items, what is?!

Nevertheless, the best moment was when Willie Brown came to the council on February 12 to ask if it was not a conflict of interest to have two council members writing for a rival newspaper. He was dead serious. Here is a guy who has received over a million dollars of taxpayer money and he had the nerve to speak about a conflict of interest.

In the same few moments he had the floor that evening, Brown insisted that the “real” publishers of the rival newspaper were Councilman Stevens and Councilwoman Dunlap. The obvious implication was that there was no way an educated African-American woman could be capable of publishing a newspaper without the help of elected officials.

One may easily infer by his outbursts that Brown naturally assumed everybody is like him.

The best way to summarize the so-called “newspaper wars” is that one paper is rooted in the dream of improving their community, and the other is committed to the status quo while making money by any means necessary.

In all fairness, some people don’t feel Willie Brown is doing anything wrong by engaging in dirty politics with taxpayers’ money. Barely concealing a mis- placed sense of pride, they say that politics is always rough and tough in Ingle- wood. Besides, they also point out that newspapers that fight crime and corruption go out of business every day! So if he can stay afloat by doing the opposite of what causes other news- papers to fail—maybe Willie Brown is smart.

Let’s face it—we’re living in an age of cynicism and distrust and we’ve seen many “well-heeled” saviors trying to buy success at the ballot box. We had former eBay CEO Meg Whitman pouring millions of her own money to be a California governor. Then the Koch Brothers, Nevada casino owner Marvin Adelson and GOP Candidate Mitt Romney spent billions in a cumulative albeit vain attempt to defeat President Obama.

Just think of the money they could have saved had they remembered a comment from President Abe Lincoln. It was notably significant in the 19th century and it remains no less resonant now: “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.”

I think we all know what time it is now.