The John and Ken Show
The show aired Monday thru Friday, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time on KFI AM 640, a local Southern California talk radio station.
Chester and Helen had two sons, John and Richard, and lived a fairly typical working-class life in northern New Jersey.
Ken Chiampou, a native of Brentwood, New York, was a certified public accountant[3] and had graduated from the University at Buffalo, working in corporate audits for a Big Eight firm.
[4] Both worked in the Elmira-Corning market in New York state in the late 1980s, Kobylt as a disc jockey at WENY and Chiampou at the station's cross-town rival WELM.
They started a food drive for rival 95.1 WAYV's morning DJ Russ Monroe after he was fired a week before Christmas.
[6] A caller, postal worker John Budzash, then suggested the idea of Hands Across New Jersey, a protest that would symbolically cut the state in half.
[7] When other callers noted that blocking traffic was illegal, the movement turned into a rally in front of the State House in Trenton.
[2] Kobylt and Chiampou also campaigned feverishly for the abolition of tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike claiming that cutting government excess expenditures could itself fund highway maintenance.
The pair left WKXW in late 1992 to move to KFI to do their afternoon drive time spot, replacing former Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates.
On March 19, 1999, The John and Ken Show was taken off the air at KFI, allegedly by a vice president in Atlanta over the syndication issue, although the spat was referred to as a "contract dispute".
Kobylt and Chiampou also had various stunts, one of which got them in trouble and forced them into attending diversity training, which they later said they resented taking, and disliked the Disney management toning down their banter.
Since then they have remained as a live program; however, some interviews are pre-recorded and replayed between hours, and at times Kobylt or Chiampou will broadcast from their home studios.
[11] Starting in January 2023, the show was reduced to three hours and moved to the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. time slot as part of a reshuffle of the entire KFI daily lineup.
Chiampou, accepting the award on behalf of the pair, mischievously thanked Antonio Villaraigosa, Stanley Tookie Williams, David Dreier, L.A. Archbishop Cardinal Roger Mahony, Robert Blake, Michael D. Brown, and Armando Garcia for providing the material that made the program possible.
The hosts regularly had recall petition gatherers on the air and almost immediately threw their support to Arnold Schwarzenegger when he announced he would run for governor.
In the run-up to the 2004 elections, their main issue was fighting what they saw as misguided policies of the federal and California state governments to encourage illegal immigration.
They devised a "competition" that they dubbed Political Human Sacrifice, in which five Republican Representatives from California were grilled regarding their stance on illegal immigration.
The comments about Dreier resulted in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission being filed by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which was rejected by the FEC on March 17, 2006.
[18] On May 2, 2005, KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin made comments alleging that Kobylt employed an illegal immigrant.
In September 2011, Kobylt and Chiampou expressed opposition to the California Dream Act, a bill that would extend financial aid to immigrants regardless of their legal status.
As part of their opposition, they broadcast the cellular number of a spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).
[2] This caused a stir in media circles and in the African-American community as racially insensitive reference to the recently dead singer.
Recurring features of the show include Chiampou's Friday movie review, where he grades one movie released that week on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being highest;[26] the "Moist Line", which plays edited listener comments on a voice mail line; and Hack in a Dumpster which is a homage to 2014 Ukraine revolution in metaphorically disposing of a public figure which the hosts disagree with.
