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Last week on the Ten network's Beauty and the Beast program Stan Zemanek was mouthing off about illegal immigrants. "Why should we give the illegals a fair go? They're law-breakers, they're queue jumpers," he told his audience.

Zemanek claimed that 0.5 per cent of illegal arrivals in Australia are genuine refugees.

The statement is breathtaking in its inaccuracy and frightening in what it represents. The real ratio of those who are recognised as legitimate refugees after arriving in Australia is closer to 20 per cent says Peter Mares, the presenter of Asia Pacific on Radio National and Radio Australia. He has turned the spotlight on the media's neglect of this issue with his timely and disturbing book, Borderline: Australia's treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.

Zemanek's ignorance is not atypical of the Australian media, which have generally failed to cover the issue of Australia's new arrivals with much clarity or depth. With some excellent exceptions, there has been precious little reporting on the underlying causes of the recent surge of boat people or the true state of conditions for the people who apply for refuge status in Australia.

Mares doesn't bash the media over the head, although he does lament their "knee-jerk and sensationalist" approach to the issue.

Instead, he calmly illustrates how little coverage the media have given to the plight of the thousands of people crammed into oppressive detention centres in the deserts of Western Australia and South Australia.

An example he cites occurred in February last year, when several Afghan and Iraqi detainees at Curtin Air Base near Derby had become so frustrated by their conditions they resorted to sewing their lips together in protest. Any reasonable-minded person would assume this reflected desperation andŠ that their grievances were worth listening to. However, Australia's newspapers all but ignored the story by reducing the issue to 50 words news-brief items.

Tabloid and broadsheet papers dismissed the protesters by describing their action as "bizarre" or "grisly".

Virtually no attempts were made to contextualise the issue, let alone empathise with the people concerned. As Mares points out, the media wee too busy at the time with a more important story about a "feisty ferret" that had bitten a Queensland policeman's penis.

Mares also highlights this neglect by revealing just how many extraordinary stories there are to tell, if only the media would get off their butts and cover them.

A great many of the cases that wend their way through the Refugee Review Tribunal or the court system are compelling. The arrivals have amazing tales of survival against incredible odds. Yet these people are virtually never invited to share their stories.

In the book there's a harrowing account of what has been going on at Curtin from the doctor who visited the centre. One inmate couldn't get word to his family that he was safe because the detention centre had a policy of refusing phone calls. When the visiting doctor relayed a message to his friends on the outside they were overjoyed, as they had assumed he'd drowned at sea and had already held a funeral service for him.

Wow. This is going on in civilised Australia. Stories like this should be reported more widely more often.

Journalists are hamstrung by the lack of access to centres at Woomera and Port Hedland and are often forced to rely on official news from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. But this is only part of the explanation. There's no shortage of ex-detainees who can talk and plenty of other ways to find out what's going on.

There's also another, more saddening reason why the issue isn't given the treatment it warrants. Some in the media seem to fear refugees and aren't shy when it comes to denouncing their claim to basic rights.

Take the item Mares quotes from April last year on the Seven network's Today Tonight program, which blasted federal authorities for "secretly" bussing 30 "illegals" into Adelaide early one morning and fixing them up with "visas, benefits and Medicare entitlements".

The program suggested these people were queue jumping and that there was a "covert conspiracy" to open the floodgates to illegal immigrants who were getting a cushy ride at the expense of the taxpayers.

That's the other benefit of this book. Mares arms the reader with a thorough understanding of how the system works -- and doesn't work. It is immediately apparent that asylum seekers do not get a cushy ride. On the contrary, the human cost for most of the arrivals is immense. He argues the system is arbitrary and dehumanising. Applicants live in a destructive state of limbo for years waiting to see whether their bids for refugee status or citizenship are successful.

Of course, not all the treatment is the same and Mares acknowledges the exceptions. He has told me that programs such as Insight on the SBS and the ABC's Four Corners, as well as writers Mary Crock in The Australian Financial Review, Mark Dodd, Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and Matthew Spencer and Kevin Meade in The Australian have all attempted to cover the issue with some degree of sensitivity.

Perhaps Zemanek could take the time to pick up a copy of Mare's book and digest its contents. Many others in the media should do the same. Maybe our indifference and ignorance would be given a much needed jolt.

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