Strange though it may seem, a lot of journalists get into the business for the same reason that a lot of politicians do: they want to change the world.

If people can only be told the truth, they reckon, the world will be a different place.

That's undoubtedly the goal that drives Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. It was the goal that drove Chris Masters and his team when they spent weeks investigating the 'joke' in Fortitude Valley for the Four Corners program that became known as The Moonlight State. It was what drove Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they spent night after night, for month after month, chasing Watergate rabbits down Watergate holes; and Seymour Hersh as he pursued the truth of what happened at My Lai.

In those cases, journalism did change the world, at least a bit, and at least for a while. And just in the past few weeks, Four Corners has changed the world for pastoralists in northern Australia, for better or worse. But how rarely it happens!

At least as often, a bigger impact comes from media efforts that aren't, strictly speaking, journalism. When I was in my first year at uni, Ken Loach's devastating television drama Cathy Come Home electrified Britain. It brought home the reality of homelessness and under-privilege in a way that many worthy current affairs programs had failed to do.

In the early 1980s, the ABC drama trilogy Scales of Justice exposed the reality of police corruption years before The Moonlight State.

But the truth is, journalism or drama that genuinely changes attitudes is very rare.

I realised, after a few years in the business, that my job was to describe the world, and that wanting to change it would distort the process. Nevertheless, I produced several programs which I naively thought would change the world a little bit.

But I also came to understand that for the most part, people bring their prejudices with them when they read and watch. If what they see agrees with what they think they already know, they accept what they're told as true. If not, not. And then it's the journalist, not them, who is wrong, or misinformed, or gullible, or biased. People's minds are very hard indeed to change.

What's remarkable about SBS's recent 'reality' series Go Back To Where You Came From is that it does seem to have changed some people's minds - and not only those who went on the journey it documented.

Like all the best ideas, it was simple - though certainly not simple to pull off. It can't have been easy to persuade the Malaysian immigration police to conduct a raid with all those Australian witnesses; or the UNHCR to allow a group of Australian civilians to pretend to be refugees, even for a few hours; or the US Army to escort more Australian civilians through Baghdad.

And the programs were directed, shot and edited with a very high degree of professional skill.

But what made the series was the idea of finding people who brought strong prejudices to the issue - prejudices which they share with a substantial majority of Australians - as well as the courage to allow the program to take them where it did.

It took courage, too, to voice what they thought. The likes of Raquel Moore and Darren Hassan were given hell on Twitter. But their views are shared by millions - people who would never have watched a straightforward documentary on SBS that took us where these programs went. For 'reality' to become real, it needs to be seen through the eyes of people who think as we do.

Of course, for the most part, the programs were preaching to the converted - that is, to that section of the population that already believes that most asylum-seekers are genuinely fleeing persecution and danger. But at least some of the hundreds of comments on SBS's website are clearly from people who shared the views of the majority of the participants. Some had their minds changed too.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul Sheehan was unmoved - and his objections were not by any means unreasonable.

This debate is not about empathy. It is not about numbers. It is not about race. It is about principle: control the borders. The biggest beneficiaries of strict border control would be legitimate asylum seekers.

That is a reasonable position - as, for that matter, was the position of the Howard government. But Sheehan is wrong, it seems to me, when he writes that the programs repackaged and recrafted "the falsity at the centre of this debate": the proposition that "if you believe in stopping the small number of asylum seekers who arrive by boat, you are lacking in empathy, lacking in compassion, and probably anti-Muslim."

Yes, that is certainly false as a logical proposition. There are perfectly good reasons, which Darren Hassan articulated in the program, why people who empathise with the plight of refugees can still argue that we should be doing everything in our power to stop the boats.

However, as anyone who has seen the outpouring of popular opinion around this topic knows, - and as executive producer of The 7.30 Report during the Tampa affair, I read hundreds of emails, letters and phone messages on the topic each week - it's undeniable that a great many of those who feel most passionately against boat people do so because they believe that they are economic refugees, are opportunists in search of the dole, are cheats, are liars, are the sort of people who would throw their kids into the sea - and very possibly terrorists to boot.

That hasn't changed in the 10 years since Tampa. Listen to talkback radio any day of the week.

It's that lack of compassion, that demonisation, of asylum-seekers and refugees that Go Back Where You Came From was seeking to change. What we saw so clearly demonstrated is that ordinary Australians like Raye and Raquel - like ordinary people everywhere, for I don't think there's anything special about Australians in this respect - are kind-hearted and empathetic in the face of grief and suffering.

Getting support for tough measures, of course, would be harder if most Australians felt that most boat people were genuine, desperate refugees. Yet those tough measures might still be the right political response to a problem that nobody should pretend is straightforward.

But Go Back To Where You Came From, it seems to me, was not a series about political choices. It was simply putting Australian viewers, briefly, in the shoes of those many millions around the world who desperately hope for somewhere safe to live.

At one point in program three, as the Australians said goodbye to the refugee family they'd met in the Kenyan refugee camp, Raye was found crying.

"We're leaving, but they can't," she said, "They have to stay here."

Anyone who's been a foreign correspondent in the tougher parts of the world knows that feeling of guilt, as you walk into the airport and leave hell behind for other people to endure.

"We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come" is a perfectly defensible principle, and one that the SBS programs did not attempt to challenge. But surely, whatever the political choices we have to make, it can't be a bad thing to help Australians realise that those who come to our shores in desperation don't deserve our hatred, or our fear, or our contempt.

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch.