From WNYRC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week after months of rule by an interim government, Peru got closer to electing a new president.

The April 8th vote narrowed the field of candidates to just two.

Alejandro Toledo and former president Alan Garcia will now face each other in a runoff election in a year when it seems the government has loosened its grip on the media.

Lucien Chauvin, a freelance journalist in Lima, joins us now.

Lucian, what a difference a year makes when on the media last spoke to you during the peruvian presidential elections a year ago,

the coverage in Peruvian broadcast media was so slanted against the opposition.

It almost seemed like it had been bought and paid for by Alberto Fujimori's government.

Now it turns out that...

Indeed it was bought and paid for.

What happened?

Beginning in 1996, 1997, when Fujimori, Alberto Fulhi Mori decided he was going to run for

a third term last year, his government began devising a plan to take control of the media.

Basically what this entailed was with buying off the station

owners with sumptuous sums of money and this wasn't simply revealed this

was actually videotaped the whole country got to witness this tell me about

that yes well uh... uh... would you more is national security advice of Vladimir

Montesinos had a pension for for tapinging everything and all of the people who passed

through his office over the past few years.

When Fujimori's government collapsed in November, and he fled to Japan, raids on Montecino's

house and investigations into the National Security Service turned up thousands of

...