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October 29, 2008 09:31am AEDT | Make this site your homepage

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Multi-channelling risks 'media ghettos'

Stephen Lunn | October 29, 2008

THE availability of hundreds of TV channels could see viewers retreat into their own narrow ""media ghettos"", the head of the ABC has warned.

The new media landscape, which will include more multi-channelling and internet content delivered on televisions, has the potential to change society, allowing people to limit their viewing to material that reinforces pre-existing views, Mark Scott said yesterday.

Mr Scott was speaking at the Global Foundation's Australia Unlimited roundtable in Melbourne yesterday, addressing a session entitled "Towards a more inclusive society".

"The media plays a profound role in how we understand ourselves and also how we understand our neighbours here and in the region," he said.

The new media landscape would create greater choice and freedom, but at the same time "there are risks people will retreat into their own media ghettos", he said.

Waleed Aly, from Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Centre, said the media was "probably the most powerful way into our national imagination".

But rather than fracturing our society, he said it tended to "promulgate an orthodoxy about our national identity".

Mr Aly said it was noteworthy the ABC's television network that broadcasts into Asia had a number of ethnic presenters, but its presenters on programs that screened in Australia tended to be less multicultural.

"The more visual media in Australia gets, the narrower it gets," Mr Aly said.

"I find it interesting that the face we like to present to the world is different to the one we present at home."

The former governor-general Peter Hollingworth told the conference it was critical that governments maintained a commitment to ensuring all levels of society were in their policy sights regardless of the economic conditions.

Mr Hollingworth said the years of prosperity Australians had enjoyed had not guaranteed improvement in the lives of the nation's most disadvantaged.

"The trickle-down effect doesn't trickle down very far, in my experience," he said.

He said there was a danger the Government could become preoccupied with handling the current economic crisis and neglect those at the bottom end of the income spectrum. "Let's not lose heart in addressing social inclusion," he said.

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