Boris not being a pleasant buffoon? Nobody cares…

(c) Kradlum

Reports are reaching the blogosphere but mysteriously enough not the mainstream media, that Mayor of London Boris Johnson is up to his old tricks. By this, I don’t mean ‘appearing amusingly flustered on comedy panel shows’, I mean ‘appearing to present false statements in public while enacting regressive measures on the ground.’ I was tempted to write ‘regressive and unpopular measures’, but given that none of Boris’ misdemeanours ever receive any press coverage, I’ll have to grant that his policies (at odds with public opinion though they may be ) never get the chance to become unpopular.

The latest should-be controversy concerns Boris’s denial that he will remove hundreds of police officers, despite the fact that his budget proposed a reduction of around 500: “Over the three years to 2012-13, the number of Police Officers is forecast to decrease by 455, while PCSOs remain the same and Special Constables increase by 2,690.”

This leads to the following Have-I-Got-News-for-You-worthy exchange with a Lib Dem London Assembly member:

Dee: I’m sorry I’m going to pass you a copy of your budget

[John Biggs puts the sheet on Boris's desk. Boris looks straight ahead]

Chairman: Is there anything else that you would like to add to your answer?

Boris: No I think that Dee is completely wrong…

Dee: It’s in your budget

It ought to be surprising that such evasions actually pass for acceptable policy-making, without so much as a hint of objection from the mainstream press, but sadly such a lack of accountability is par for the political course. What is perhaps most worrying is not Boris’s refusal to defend what is demonstrably his policy position, but the fact that media coverage of politicians is so partial – compare the numerous occasions that Ken Livingstone was grilled in the press over controversies that eventually turned out to be non-issues.

Plausibly, the main issue is not consciously partisan bias, but rather the media’s lazy tendency to produce stories that fit with the narrative the public expects. Boris is broadly seen as an essentially straight character, too bumbling to be cunning,  so from the point of view of any single journalist, writing a story that falls outside this narrative has little to recommend it. If most people are going to continue to think of Boris as ‘pretty much alright, but just a bit scatty’, trying to put forward a fact contrary to this is futile, doomed by the confirmation bias.

Certainly people love a scoop, a story that overturns expectations, like the recent Tiger Woods scandal – but the story that ‘everybody got it entirely wrong’ needs to be sufficiently weighty for it to overturn prior consensus. If you combine this with even a hint of partisan bias in the media (and the easy ride that Cameron has received suggests that there is more than a hint) the result is a media culture that cannot help but churn out essentially vapid non-reporting. The problem is that the public cannot discern biased reporting, if a host of issues are automatically barred from even becoming news.

It seems likely that with mounting pressure to make savings, the coming months will see increasing numbers of cuts that politicians will be keen to ignore. It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will let them get away with it.