Death row clash

Tune in to the afternoon “John and Ken Show” on talk radio’s KFI-AM (640) and you get a highly personalized take on Stanley Tookie Williams and those who are lobbying for the commutation of his death sentence. NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon is “a lunatic.” Los Angeles journalist/progressive political advocate Jasmyne Cannick is a “black racist” and a “crackpot activist trying to make a name for herself.” Williams himself? A conman in a murderer’s prison jumpsuit.

As the calendar flips quickly to Williams’ scheduled execution early Tuesday morning, the former Crip has become a cause celebre for talk radio hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, who have been devoting the 5 o’clock hour of their 3-to-7 p.m. show to their “Tookie Must Die for Murdering Four Innocent People” campaign -- announced with four gunshots symbolizing Williams’ victims.

Williams, who has exhausted his legal appeals and has petitioned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency based on his anti-gang work from death row, would be the 12th man to be executed in California since a 1978 ballot initiative reinstated the death penalty. Compared with the earlier executions, the Williams case, with its colliding moral and social issues, has taken an unusual hold on the public’s interest -- and become daily grist for Kobylt and Chiampou.

Their broadcasts have drawn outrage from those who perceive whispers of racism coursing through radio dialogues that have included one of the hosts reading Williams’ co-written “Gangs and Drugs” book in an affected street accent, mocking the speech of some of Williams’ African American defenders.

“They’re shock jocks,” says Cannick, who, through the Urban Policy Roundtable, filed a complaint against the Clear Channel-owned station with the Federal Communications Commission two weeks ago over the “Tookie Must Die” hour. “What ‘John and Ken’ are doing is particularly egregious at this stage.”

In an interview Thursday, Kobylt said the campaign seeks to expose what he and Chiampou see as falsehoods spread by Williams’ supporters over the nature of the killings and what transpired during the trial. According to Arbirtron ratings, their program is the top-rated afternoon-drive talk show in Los Angeles, tied for third overall in a field led by Spanish-language KXOL-FM (“Latino 96.3”) and dominated by music-format stations.

“The pro-Tookie side had put together such a powerful mythology that we thought we had to do something that would dramatically [draw] people’s attention to the truth of the case,” Kobylt says. “It’s not just two yahoos screaming, ‘Fry him!’ ”

Critics say “The John and Ken Show” has added little to the public debate over the Williams case, which lies at the intriguing intersection of personal belief in the death penalty and in an individual’s capacity for redemption.

“The best stories often aren’t about good versus evil, but about one good versus another, irreconcilable good,” says Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center and associate dean for programs and planning at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In this case, there’s the good of retribution versus the good of redemption. Which is more important: the lesson of criminal deterrence or the lesson of personal reformation? Add to that the issue of sincerity, which everyone has an opinion about -- has he really changed, or is it an act? -- and the case is impossible to ignore.”

The case also touches on such nettlesome issues as the relative weights of social good and private retribution; the right of a state to kill its constituents; personal faith that government can get something -- the death penalty -- right amid general skepticism about bureaucratic efficiency; and pervasive cynicism, particularly among minorities, about how American justice is arrived at in the first place.

Little of that gets explored on “The John and Ken Show.” Instead, listeners get interviews with people who mostly agree with the hosts that Williams should be executed, gory and emotion-churning details about the killings, and a steady patter of mockery and ad hominem attacks on those who disagree.

“I don’t think it contributes to any thoughtful discussions on the issues,” says Franklin Gilliam, founding director of UCLA’s Center for Communications and Community.

What it does do, he says, is unleash personal views about race that might otherwise go unexpressed, allowing some venting under the guise of political discourse.

“It is sort of indicative of the corrosive state of American race relations,” says Gilliam, who is also a UCLA political science professor. “One of the reasons there is such a piling on and such delight in this is that many people feel stifled to express their views on race, and this allows them to do it in the context of a case where the opposing view is to defend a gangbanger and convicted murderer....”

Co-host Kobylt has said on the air that the hosts have also targeted Scott Peterson, who is white, and convicted child-killers David Westerfield and Alejandro Avila -- Westerfield is white and Avila Latino -- which he cites as proof that they aren’t motivated by race.

The show focuses not on the Tookie Williams of today but on the Williams who was convicted of killing four people during two holdups in February and March 1979.

“We’ve gone through in excruciating details what Tookie really did” to draw the death penalty in the first place, Kobylt says, while demanding tangible proof that Williams -- who still proclaims his innocence -- has actually undergone some sort of personal redemption.

“I don’t know how he’s redeemed,” Kobylt says. “How does writing books make up for the loss of the four people who were brutally shotgunned? He’s never even admitted to the crime and said he’s sorry.”

Kobylt says the hosts don’t pretend to offer balanced coverage. “What we do is get all the information we can, like a journalist would, but then take it a step further and come up with a judgment,” Kobylt says.

And a little controversy rarely hurts ratings.

“The purpose of talk radio is to sell your eardrums to advertisers,” Kaplan says. “It’s a win-win from the point of view of the corporations that put this content on the air in order to attract listeners and sell advertising.”

But it’s not a “win-win” for everyone.

“It’s not a particularly good thing,” Kaplan says, “if you care about civil discourse and reasoned discussion about contentious issues.”