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. As the magazine's editor, British Tory MP Boris Johnson shouldered the blame for the offending piece. Using an archive of letters written to the MP in the wake of the scandal, the paper argues 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, the author concludes, speaks to an important weakness in structures of cultural citizenship.