ROME – In 2010, Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, a right-wing Tea Party stalwart, briefly became a national sensation due to some fairly self-parodying comments about the press. In an interview with Fox News, complaining about the way negative media coverage had damaged her poll numbers, Angle delivered her immortal line. “We needed to have the press be our friend,” she said. “We wanted them to ask the questions we wanted to answer.”
While Angle may have been mocked, there’s a sense in which her PR model, of trying to engineer situations in which the press affords someone the opportunity to answer only the questions they perceive as desirable, is one any public figure probably would aspire to – and, it must be said, it’s been raised to a fine art by Pope Francis.
