The big question racing round the media and the net is: did Jaffe walk or was he pushed? But in an age when the big news organizations are repositioning themselves as verifiers of the news, given the predominance of the blogosphere and the Twitterati as breakers of the news, it’s never going to be as cut and dried as that.

According to RadarOnline, and quoted in the Mail, Jaffe has stated: “The case was so all encompassing in terms of my time and the strict orders by the judge. I have other clients in serious crises who require my time.”

Reading between the lines, I can’t help but suspect that representing Oksana Grigorieva must have been tough – the story is wall to wall in America and there are any number of people getting in on the act, trying to make a fast buck out of the tabloid feeding frenzy.

Given that the internet is a remorseless story pump (imagine the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico before BP capped it, but replace the oil with a heady brew of gossip, scandal and press releases), any publicist dealing with a story as big as this one is likely to be on it 24 hours a day. That’s not a situation in which one can be strategic, as the constant flurry of rumour, counter-rumour and media theorizing would mean that everything has to be dealt with now, this second, without a moment to plan.

For a publicist, working in a situation like this is akin to throwing one’s career into a spin drier – there is no control to be had, especially when both the leading players seem to be dead set on making each other’s lives extremely difficult which, by extension, makes the lives of those working with them extremely difficult too. A good publicist doesn’t dish the dirt on their client, not even an ex-client whom they parted with acrimoniously.

Not that one is ever likely to find out precisely what is going on behind the scenes – there’s more than enough bullshit flying around to obscure that nicely. Better that a good story gets out, anyway – the truth in these instances is usually pretty dull.

There is also little money in this game. Very few tabloid figures can afford to remunerate for the sort of 24/7 council and strategic advice that the Mel/Oksana situation demands. Characters who allow their lives to be defined by opinion and the lust of the crowd will undoubtedly be terrible clients. It usually takes about 48 hours to come to that realisation.

And, most importantly, a sensible 60-year-old cherishes his life over and above high emotional spin cycle. Whisper it, who needs a toxic client. There is no glamour. There is only the horror.

It’s not the opportunity to win a walk-on part in the series that I’m talking about, either – although that is a fine stunt to grab attention (who wouldn’t want to get dressed up in Madison Avenue finery and appear on screen with the intensely glam Mad Men and Women?). It’s more the homage to the great publicist Jim Moran in the actual episode that piqued my interest.

In the episode, a couple of actors are hired to fight over a ham to garner attention and are then seen being bribed to blow the stunt – it’s a fairly knockabout scene, especially when the cast try to stop the actors blowing the stunt. In real life, Jim Moran staged a row between to New York barkeepers to launch Pimms in America – he had them end up in court, rowing about the perfect ingredients for a Pimms and garnered a great deal of attention for the drink.

If Moran’s elegantly twisted wit and genius is being plundered by Mad Men already, it just goes to prove my point about PR being a richer seam to mine – they’ve run out of real stories from advertising. Is it not time. then, for a truer drama looking at the heart of the American dream? One that looks at the lives of the PR men?

Mel Gibson’s everywhere, in stories relating to the tapes that are allegedly of him violently, angrily haranguing the mother of his youngest child, Oksana Grigorieva, in racist, sexist and vulgar terms. It smacks of a put-up job to me, but it’s a story that will run and run.

Lindsay Lohan, in case you missed it, is also in trouble, serving ninety days in jail for drink-driving offences. If you were judging by the amount of comment and analysis the story’s getting, you’d expect her to have been found guilty of triggering an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Falkland Islands or something similar. Not that Lohan will serve her time – the latest reports suggest that she could serve as little as nine days “because of overcrowding”.

Meanwhile, Rachel Uchitel (Tiger Woods’s mistress) has joined Celebrity Rehab – despite the fact that it has been revealed she has no addiction (home wrecking doesn’t count). Since meeting the show’s doctor, a story has started to spin out into the news that she has a pill addiction, to the prescription drug Ambien. It’s intriguing to discover that Donald Trump, of all people, fired her from the Celebrity Apprentice show because she was appearing on too many other reality shows – perhaps he had spotted her genuine addiction to fame.

What’s fascinating is how far these stories have spread into the American mainstream. These celebrity stories are being poured over by thousands of commentators, from attorneys to councillors (although there are no publicists – they’re all too careful to bite the sort of hands that are feeding them vast amounts of cash I suspect) but what is shocking is that even Time magazine is commissioning features – notably on the psychology behind Mel Gibson’s rage.

The appetite for showbiz is vast in America and is beginning to eclipse the serious news. I thought this obsession would have begun to abate by now, but it’s growing – the feeding frenzy gathers ever more vultures and hyenas. Now you don’t have to be an A Lister to get the CNN treatment in the USA, as Rachel Uchitel and Oksana Grigorieva have proved – they are part of a growing number of very minor celebrities using their connections to get as far up the greasy pole of fame as possible.

There are no genuine stars left as a consequence. The true talent being employed these days is the creation of compelling personal narratives and who can wear them best. Do we care what stars do on screen when the celebrity storyline overpowers box office appeal in these creatively lean times. Infamy equals megabucks – but anyone seeking it really should remember the one lesson that can be learned from Carry on Cleo: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all it got it infamy!

Leaving the praise to the critics, who see it as an equivalent to Johnny Cash’s late bid for credibility, Island’s VP, David Sharpe, seems to have taken it upon himself to do the blaming, in an accusatory leaked email that suggests he would rather not have spent millions on a church album and wanted a repeat of Jones’s Sex Bomb stylings.

This was written in May, but leaked only now, in the week of release, just in time for the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and pretty much every other media outlet to get all hot under the collar about it and puff the album’s arrival in spectacular fashion in news and reviews pages.

Stunt of the week, without a doubt. But that’s not unusual, given that it was also the conversation of the week.

If all this sounds too good to be true, that’s surely because it is; this tale strikes me as a PR scam. Face it, even the Times, revelling in every second of the story, can’t help but pitch it as if it’s a high concept movie: “Part Huckleberry Finn, part Catch Me if You Can” is how they describe the Barefoot Bandit’s escapades, whilst the inevitable Facebook Fan Page describes him as “Western Washington’s new Jesse James (without the murders)”.

The crash landing of the plane is a stunt too far, however, as is the gobsmacked but supportive mother, who apparently said: “I hope to hell he stole those airplanes – I would be so proud!” If there isn’t a canny movie publicist brewing up a long-term publicity campaign for a blockbuster film somewhere behind the scenes, I’d be amazed.

If you ask me, someone’s taken the sort of stunts Harry Reichenbach used to pull about 95 years ago and run with them. Take Reichenbach’s campaign for The Virgin of Stamboul, just after World War One, which I wrote about in detail in The Fame Formula. To promote the movie, about a runaway bride who flees Istanbul, Reichenbach hired a bunch of Turkish waiters and dressed them as a sheik and his entourage. He then announced to the press that said ‘sheik’ had come to America to find his runaway bride, the virgin of Stamboul, and would appreciate the American public’s help finding her in New York.

There followed a feeding frenzy in the press, who drank up the story and portrayed it in lavish detail to an equally attentive public. Only one journalist noticed the ‘sheik’s’ frayed cuffs and picked apart the story to find it wasn’t true – but by that point no one else in the press or the public cared. It was exposed as a hoax and still people lapped up every carefully staged detail. Then, when the movie came out a few weeks later, they went to see it in their droves.

All this resonates deeply with the Barefoot Bandit’s alleged two-year-long spree of relatively harmless crime. It’s like the Virgin of Stamboul campaign, being played under deeper cover to hide the frayed cuffs a little better. There’s the mother, who wants him to flee the States and continue his spree abroad; the cross and concerned FBI special agent who worries that people are making a hero of the Bandit; the Bandit himself, a geeky looking everykid, who finds time to be charitable even as he rips of aeroplanes, but who only really hurts the insurance companies. These characters, and the harmless crimes, are so generic-yet-quirky that major stars would surely be knocking over each other to play them.

There have to be some frayed cuffs somewhere in the Bandit’s story; there’s nothing new under the sun after all and in these Twitter-obsessed times, where copy permanently needs to be filed two minutes ago, this is the sort of story that could run and run. The article reads like a movie synopsis for a family adventure movie that will doubtless have an inspiring moral tacked on at the end, and that’s probably what it is. It’s just that the journalists don’t have time to check their facts anymore.

Not that it really matters if the Bandit’s story is fact or fiction, just so long as you want to see the film version, coming in 3D to a multiplex near you soon…

The article below was published in yesterday’s Observer, alongside a big profile of Sir Martin Sorrell. My piece hasn’t been published online, so I’m reprinting it here. To read the profile online, click here.

He has impeccable timing and, even with a British accent, has the knack of setting the media business agenda across the globe. As WPP “capo di tutti capi ” he takes the lead and is willing to place himself front and centre as an uber-ambassador for an empire that does not always inspire confidence.

Selling a smorgasbord of agencies (some better than others) to a global client hasn’t been easy. The vision of good business, as seen through the WPP prism, has been a clever refraction. Sorrell could teach BP’s Tony Hayward a few tricks.

Martin is legendarily ruthless and his business energy is boundless, making him something of an unlikely role model for the Saga generation. I defy anyone to find the Sorrell off switch. In the movie Thank You For Smoking, a power broker is asked: “When do you sleep?”. The character fires back: “Sundays!” This is very much the Martin Sorrell model.

In a past career as a theatre publicist, Martin was on my first night Sleb invite list. He turned up to the opening night of Jackie Mason’s West End season and I vividly remember a guest cornering him and telling him what a great job he’d done with his business, emphasising, phlegmatically and without satirical intent, how he really loved The Rock and The Hardy Boys, but that his kids had gone off it now and were more into spiky hair, hoodies, Slipknot logos and alienated angst. I explained to the hapless punter that Martin was the chairman WPP, not WWF. Martin took it completely in his stride.

Love him or loathe him, Martin Sorrell’s ruthless endeavour is hard to match. Hotshot start-ups trying to conjure hip corporate identities should also remember there is a something truly cool about creating an empire named after a wire plastic product manufacturer. Even if, occasionally, it gets confused with wrestling…

The truth is dismal, slow and unsexy in this world of RSS feeds and instant Twitter fixes and papers are so desperate to keep up that the truth is the first thing to suffer.

Look at this article about Steven Gerrard, in which the facts have been played fast and loose in a bid to create a ’story’. The popular news cycle is about soap opera now, not truth. We are living in a world where conspiracy theorists hold the high ground and we are so swamped with untruth, half truth and scurrilous supposition that newspapers or enemies of a brand (from the England team to Marmite) can feed whatever vicious fluff they like into the rumour mill and produce a story – such as this one about Gerrard and Terry, which skates close to a possible truth (in this case, possible enmity between Terry and Gerrard over the England captaincy) – that it is easy to believe.

It’s that ease that’s the problem; we’re all over-pressed with news and ideas on a daily basis to the extent that it’s easy to believe the spurious things that SOUND like they should be true. We need to get smart to it, however, if we’re ever to break the habit. We need to ask questions rather than let overworked and/or untrustworthy sources supply us with processed bullshit. The brand destabilisation that a well ground rumour mill can create needs able publicists on hand to counter the fug of lies and half truths that litter the Internet. All this has lead to the media having to sternly deny all of the rumours about Gerrard and Terry’s enmity this morning, as the FA is collapsing under the weight of rumour.

It’s probable that the truth about many things is suppressed; what we need is to be looking under the right stones. People want compelling soaps, though. They want sexy stories, not grubby searching. At the heart of it, it seems likely that they don’t want to go looking for the truth, as they suspect they aren’t going to like what they find.

“…if a new era of transparency throws light on the secretive deals struck in the boardrooms of the BBC, insiders warned of dramatic changes to the way it does business that could set it on a collision course with its stars and their agents.

“‘There would be an absolute feeding frenzy,’ says Mark Borkowski, the entertainment industry publicist and founder of Borkowski PR. ‘It would spark a war between the media and celebrities over the amount the BBC pays and suddenly agents will need to convince the media their guy has value.’”

What do we really expect, though, when the players have too much time, money and self-regard on their hands? Take Ashley Cole, for example: he’s being lambasted in today’s Sun for sending a message on his Blackberry stating that he hates “…England and the fucking people”. It’s not really surprising that a fuss is being made – this was sent before a game had been played.

The FA are taking flack too, which may explain the rumour that Wayne Rooney will be taking part in a fan forum discussion online to diffuse the ugly situation. I can’t imagine it will, especially since Rooney apparently booked himself a holiday in Barbados two days before the dismal match against Germany.

From a PR standpoint, I’d say the best bet would be to have a cooling off period before throwing Rooney to the ravening community of football fans. It seems too desperate and too soon to me.

A cooling off period is advisable – much like the one Capello has been given. Time heals all wounds, they say. Certainly, in this instance, time would allow the England team a chance to become suitably contrite. It should also stop the press and the fans from tearing them to pieces.

Just so long as none of them open their mouths in public for a fortnight, all should be well…

It seems likely that he will go, and soon, despite a few bullish headlines suggesting that we should blame the players rather than the manager. Capello’s struggles with English and his authoritarian regime will not stand him in good stead. And he is not an accessible man, which is utterly essential in a job like this.

Look at Simon Cowell, a man who is subjected to equally rigorous scrutiny. Despite employing the services of Max Clifford and having a bank balance that could be easily used to buy off damaging stories, he remains entirely accessible. That this accessibility is carefully structured is certain, but it is more than just an impression and it certainly appeases the media.

Whoever takes over from Capello will have to be aware of this and be able to manage the media as surely and subtly as he manages the players. Whoever it is will really need to be an Englishman, or at least someone who speaks English as their first language – it is essential, from a footballing and a PR point of view, that the new manager is a clear communicator.

The manager of England’s football team, like the CEO of a big company (who can see the correlation between Tony Hayward and Capello, both inexpert at getting a useful point across?), needs to be savvy and manage expectations, be they supporters’, players’ or the media’s.

I suggest Harry Redknapp, a manager who understands both front and back pages, has no truck with ivory towers and who would most likely instil a sense of discipline in a new set of players.

I think Redknapp could take the England football squad into a brave new world of carefully downscaled expectation. Ironically, this could lead to England doing rather better in future.