The news that referee Tom Donaghy was involved in manipulating the scores of NBA games set off a blizzard of "I told you so’s" from both hardcore conspiracy theorists and more casual finger pointers who have long maintained that David Stern has fixed everything from playoff series to number one draft picks since he became commissioner in 1984.

Now admittedly a belief in conspiracies is embedded deeply in the psyche of the American public, but the suspicion that Stern is at the center of a cabal of conspirators rigging just about every aspect of the NBA’s business not only doesn’t pass the common sense test but is patently absurd.

In one of the first editorial meetings I attended with Free Times editor Frank Lewis 15 months ago (I was an associate editor there for over two years) he announced that he was leaning toward getting rid of the alternative weekly’s only African-American news writer, Roger T Jones. When I told Lewis I thought the Free Times needed a voice from the black community he looked at me quizzically and replied, “ What do we need an African-American writer for? At subsequent meetings it was not uncommon to hear a former Free Times African-American writer openly ridiculed in a manner I had never heard a white writer vilified.