Why Can't the LA Times Acknowledge They Screwed Up on John N Ken?


More than 15,000 people showed up last Saturday outside the Slidebar Cafe for a “Tax Revolt” rally held by KFI-AM 640 yakmouths John Kobyalt and Ken Chiampou…and the Los Angeles Times couldn't bring itself to cover it with the exception of a lame blog post. A Times editor dismissed it in an email to a reader as a “promotional events for radio personalities,” and wasn't that thought absolutely arrogant? Yesterday, the Times published a story claiming the demise of conservative talk-radio due to the economy and described John and Ken's rally as an “occasional stunt[s].”

To Spring Street: Get off your high horse already and admit you fucked up.

A “promotional event for radio personalities” is when Victor Zaragosa of Hot 92.3 says he'll be on the corner of Florence and Normandie giving out T-shirts, or when Art Laboe hosts one of his Killer Oldies music shows. An “occasional stunt” is like the time Poorman visited the Weekly world headquarters because he was looking for anthrax (or something like that). What happened on March 7th was something extraordinary, something as key to California conservative history as Howard Jarvis or the taking-over of the California Republican Assembly during the early 1960s by O.C. wackies. I, frankly, am freaked out by the anger some of the folks had at the rally (listen to my KPFK-FM 90.7 broadcast for more warnings and a bunch of angry lefties; segment starts about 20 minutes in), but I can acknowledge that what John and Ken accomplished was muy, muy newsworthy–much more than today's Column One on lucha libre that, while well-written (as most stuff by Kevin Baxter), is so five years ago.

And now, some fun from the John and Ken rally courtesy of perhaps the county's most-prolific YouTuber, Naui Huitzilopochtli:

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