Watch part two

We begin the show this week with the biggest democratic exercise in the world, and the media's role in it.

The voting has started in India's four-week long election process. There are more than 700 million eligible voters and 60 political parties on the ballot.

Those parties are using every media platform at their disposal to persuade India's elusive youth vote to get involved. They are targeting more than 200 million young people.

The politicians' dilemma is that the two main parties are led by candidates who are more than 75 years old – so they are struggling to connect.

The Listening Post's Meenakshi Ravi travelled to New Delhi to cover the parties, the TV channels, the papers and the corporations trying to tap into the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of Indian youth.

In part two The Listening Post travelled to Sierra Leone to report on the stations considered too dangerous for the airwaves, and to assess whether the country can rebuild itself without compromising its free press.

When television images came out of the country last month showing fighting in the streets it was a disturbing blast from the past.

Violent street riots had erupted because of clashes between the two largest political parties in Sierra Leone.

Between 1991 and 2002 the West African country suffered a civil war that saw tens of thousands killed.

It remains an exceptionally poor country, but has been relatively peaceful for the past few years.

Nevertheless, during the recent fighting, Sierra Leone's vice- president temporarily shut down two radio stations run by the two main political groups – the ruling APC party and the opposition SLPP.

The government said the stations had gone too far and had to be closed before Sierra Leone suffered the kind of mass bloodletting that Rwanda experienced in 1994 – when radio stations there urged one ethnic group to attack another.

But is the government correct and should a free media in Sierra Leone be encouraged?

In this week’s Newsbytes: Media censorship in Fiji and the media blackout that followed. American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi charged with espionage.  Journalists under attack in Thailand. Endemol does it again with a recession reality show.

Finally for our Internet video of the week, human beat box Lasse Gjertsen is a Norwegian animator, musician and videographer – the kind of person who, in the pre-internet age, we would have never heard of. He is a musician who admits that he cannot play any instruments – but he knows how to edit video and sound.

This episode of The Listening Post aired from Friday, April 17, 2009.