Invisible Centers: Boris Johnson, authenticity, cultural citizenship and a centrifugal model of media power

Abstract

In October 2004, British Tory MP Boris Johnson found himself in conflict with the city of Liverpool. The wrath of the Mersey had been incurred by an editorial published in a magazine called The Spectator decrying a “culture of sentimentality” eroding Britain's moral fiber. This had been demonstrated in the public mourning of Liverpool-born engineer Ken Bigley, who had been kidnapped and executed by Iraqi militia. As the magazine's editor, Johnson shouldered the blame for the offending piece. Using an archive of letters written to the MP in the wake of the scandal, the present paper will argue that this was an event lending important insights into how audiences make sense of mediated politics. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used to outline a centrifugal model of media power. Within this paradigm, the data suggest that while audiences are highly critical of discrete media representations, they have little to say on fundamental relations between politics and mediation. Public readings of “authenticity” are used to demonstrate centrifugal thinking. Authenticity is presented as a phenomenon with a necessarily performed and therefore mediated dimension. Although critiques of performance are present in the Johnson letters, definitions of the authentic are dominated by empirically realist orientations, suggesting a tendency to focus on content over form. This, I conclude, speaks to an important weakness in structures of cultural citizenship.

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