"Back-stage is informal, and it includes both hanging out with your buddies and confidantes, and planning how to handle your front-stage performances. The glib term “transparency” so widely demanded today implies there should be no backstages; no one ever gets to plan anything or to say what they really believe; it all has to be goody-goody front-stage clichés." RC
I want to mention, really only just hint at here, some implications of this aspect of charisma which Collins only touches on in this paragraph, and to point out some of the enormous difficulties caused by media control of government functioning through open government regulations of all kinds, from public records requests, to open government requirements and sunshine laws.
Having handled these kinds of matters for state and local governments, although the average citizen naively believes that they are all necessary and required by the Constitution, and has been convinced by constant media harping on them that they are always for everyone's best interests, trust me they are at best crippling for effective government deliberations on complex matters and appropriate decision making, charismatic or not, and generally have mainly benefitted local and national media interests, which actually control these governments rather than the other way around, and which have long been mostly of the muckraking type.
Collins is so right.
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