I think it’s more complicated than either trying to appease readers or influence them. I think it’s to do with how sense-making is formed through the way other people and objects are represented within the psyche. These representations at least partially, if not wholly, exist as part of a constructed discourse within social groups, rather than being purely individual, cognitive structures. In turn, this means that an imagined group (i.e. an in-group that have never actually met each other in person, but exist as a group through imagined commonalities) can develop towards a discourse that represent particular characters as containing sets of characteristics, such as the hero archetype, that are baffling to outsiders. So “Boris the hero” is a co-construction between the Daily Mail and its readers; a dialectic framed by things like confirmation and attention biases, that takes on a self-perpetuating narrative force of its own.