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Crusading for truth, justice, on weekday afternoons

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Special to The Times

The hosts of “The John & Ken Show” are barely finished championing their latest crusade, or flogging their latest miscreant, when another target crops up. Luckily for them, John Kobylt says, “there seems to be no shortage of idiocy.”

Kobylt and his partner, Ken Chiampou, heard weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on KFI-AM (640), say they search for topics that may not make the front page or the top of the broadcast news hour but will nevertheless resonate with listeners: an injustice that listeners recognize is also happening at their kid’s school or at their job, or an obscure bill that could affect their lives. Or Kobylt and Chiampou spotlight some reprobate for public ridicule. And a groundswell of listener interest begins.

“This is radio as theater -- good guys, bad guys, some moral issue. There’s a clear villain and easily identifiable victims,” Kobylt said. And with new characters or developments emerging each day, “it’s something you can almost create a serial out of.”

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Their most recent battle was successfully rallying listeners to shut down a Web site, schoolscandals.com, run by a San Fernando Valley high school student that was essentially a virtual bathroom wall, where students could write rumors, lies, innuendo and other profane comments about classmates.

Now they’ve taken up the cause of Teri March, whose husband, David, was an L.A. sheriff’s deputy gunned down April 29, 2002, in Irwindale. The suspected killer, Jorge “Armando” Arroyo Garcia, fled to Mexico, which refuses to extradite anyone facing the death penalty or life imprisonment. Kobylt and Chiampou have begun calling all the members of the California congressional delegation to put them on the spot about the case, and announcing the lawmakers’ office phone numbers and e-mail addresses, so their listeners can exert some pressure of their own.

If the duo can’t persuade a legislator to come onto the program, they ask their audience to start lobbying. “We’re going to announce that we’ve got them on the air,” Chiampou said during a show last week, “or you’re going to do some work.”

Now on their second tour of duty at KFI, John and Ken have been fixtures on the local scene since 1992. They met in 1986 at a station in Canton, Pa., then began working together two years later at an oldies station in Atlantic City, N.J. They moved on to WKXW in Trenton, N.J., gaining fame by attacking the tax policies of then-Gov. Jim Florio.

“They’re able to mobilize their fans in a way that’s quite remarkable,” said Al Peterson, news-talk-sports editor at the trade magazine Radio & Records. “They want to rouse you to the cause.”

Early last year, they organized a write-in campaign to defeat the reelection bid of Orange County Superior Court Judge Ronald C. Kline, indicted on child pornography and molestation charges. More than 233,000 voters wrote in names of Kline’s 11 challengers.

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Kobylt, 41, said the success of their Kline campaign led a listener to forward them e-mails in April 2002 from Cardinal Roger Mahony and his staff about their tactics to deal with priests accused of abuse, which the pair read on the air -- adding even more fuel to the hot news story of the day and prompting a visit from the district attorney’s office. He said their audience believes, “Oh, give this to John and Ken, they’ll run with it.”

Chiampou added, “We know what our audience expects of us, and we have that down to a science. They’re looking to us to filter through the nonsense and the mistruths.”

Change in focus

But the show wasn’t always so focused or activist, and Chiampou, 46, said the Kline case wouldn’t “have hit on our radar five years ago.” The pair used to change topics by the hour but recognized their biggest audience increases came when they latched onto multiday stories, such as the O.J. Simpson and Menendez murder trials.

“We love covering the trials, to point out the absurdity of the legal system,” Kobylt said.

Last year, during the San Diego trial of David Westerfield, eventually convicted of killing his 7-year-old neighbor Danielle van Dam, the pair compared the jury’s intellect to broccoli for not returning with a guilty verdict quickly enough, and handed out stalks of the vegetable in front of the courthouse. The trial judge called Kobylt and Chiampou “idiots.”

“We didn’t do it to get attention,” Kobylt said, but were just making a joke: “ ‘Why don’t we go down to the courthouse and pass out the broccoli stalks?’ We went to sleep, woke up the next morning and all hell had broken loose.”

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“People say we just do this for ratings,” Chiampou said.

“The truth is, we do everything for ratings,” Kobylt finished. “Yes, that’s our job. I can show you the contract.”

They organized a listeners’ parade of 75 sport-utility vehicles to Sacramento last summer, to protest a proposed law to regulate tailpipe emissions. They hounded the Beverly Hills-based Trevor Law Group, accusing them of abusing the state’s consumer-protection laws to file frivolous suits against vulnerable small businesses. California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer has since filed suit against the group, which is under investigation by federal prosecutors. And, leading up to the war with Iraq, John & Ken organized protests against celebrities who they felt were ill-informed and were misusing their fame to speak out against the war. “I think they needed to hear some free speech in the other direction,” Kobylt said. “If they deserve it, they’re going to get it. This is not ‘Meet the Press.’ It’s not the Jim Lehrer ‘NewsHour.’ ”

Their show is far more advocacy than analysis. Unlike many talk-radio hosts, they’re not picking targets and dropping bombs from a safe perch above the fray. Instead, when they see a story to follow, they parachute into the middle of it, bayonets fixed and urging their listeners to follow them in.

Nor are they the Republican or Libertarian ideologues found on so many other talk-radio programs. For example, Kobylt called the Bush administration “absolutely shameful” for not doing more in the March case.

“We’ll take on a windbag from any political camp,” Kobylt said in an interview. “I’d rather attach myself to what’s going on in the world than try to promote some stupid ideology.”

Getting the numbers

Although one recent target -- the father of the teenage Web master of schoolscandals.com -- called their show “the news equivalent of professional wrestling,” the latest Arbitron ratings indicate they’re doing exactly what their station and their audience want them to do. In the first three months of the year, among listeners ages 12 and older, John & Ken finished ahead of afternoon rivals Tom Leykis on KLSX-FM (97.1) and Larry Elder on KABC-AM (790).

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“They’re about as good as a team could be,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio industry journal.

“They’re socially and politically dynamic, not only funny and entertaining but extremely influential in the community they operate in. They’re a true act, like Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis,” he said. “They formed together, they came up through the ranks together, and they’ve evolved and matured in a very, very distinct way.”

The pair came to KFI from New Jersey in 1992, then left for rival KABC-AM (790) in a contract dispute in 1999. But they returned to KFI in early 2001, saying that KABC station management was too timid, and that they weren’t suited to the morning drive slot they had switched to.

When they moved to KABC, they gave up syndicating their program, which had been broadcast to about 125 stations nationwide. Kobylt said they’re most comfortable and effective taking on local and state issues.

“I think what we’re doing now is probably the best format for us,” he said.

The pair’s brash style rankles some, who question the taste of broadcasting from in front of a murder suspect’s house. And the duo can induce some outrage of their own, such as when they blame a recurring target -- illegal immigrants -- for emergency-room overcrowding or traffic, for example.

“People used to be appalled that Mike Wallace would shove a microphone and camera in someone’s face,” Radio & Records’ Peterson said. “Not everyone’s going to like their style or like their techniques. But if they believe they’re right, they’re going to stick to it.”

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