Add to that the fact that the 9 year old girl who died was born on September 11 2001 and you have a indictment of the past decade of American politics wrapped up in one neatly symbolic bundle.

And what makes it sadder is that many of the lessons do not seem to be being learned. Sarah Palin, fresh from a PR meltdown and condemnation for her crosshairs chart aiming at prominent Democrats, has landed herself in further hot water by accusing the critics who accused her of stirring up the situation that lead to the shooting of blood libel. Bearing in mind that Giffords is Jewish and Palin avowedly Christian, it is just the sort of inflammatory language the situation didn’t need.

Emotional language is all the rage in America in the wake of the funeral (a TV event no less), but there are better ways of using it. Take Obama’s statement that he intends to be the healer in chief as a prime example. His language is carefully moderated and guaranteed to pour oil on troubled waters, conjuring visions of the people who died as part of a tableaux of American life and the tragedy of the loss, telling the American people “we can be better”.

Unless more violence is at the heart of the American right’s long term aims, the shadowy PRs behind people like Palin need to make sure the language and symbolism she and other right wing politicians and commentators use is toned down. They have all this money behind them, casting out for good advice, and yet they seem to have missed out on the fact that a calming soundbite is all important, now especially.

They need to look at the symbolism, the nature of the language they are using. If they don’t, they will either talk themselves right out of power or the USA into a period of escalated interior violence that would unsettle the world.

Predicted viewing figures suggest a modern record which will grab the headlines and refocus attention on the Dark Lord himself, Simon Cowell. You know, he who can walk on water, the saviour of ITV, the man who has redefined event TV.

I, on the other hand, will be more interested to see how the narrative of the next chapter of Simon Cowell’s personal story shapes as he moves the X Factor juggernaut to trundle through America. Will his throne be exposed as a bench covered with velvet?

The man charged with managing this important move is Matt Hiltzic. Evidently, he told a friend of mine last weekend that he has been appointed as chief strategic advisor on X Factor, working directly with Cowell. This is because Max Clifford can’t, or won’t, travel to the States. In truth, Max is a very powerful operator in the UK but does not have the influence or raw collateral power to pull significant strings in the US.

Hiltzic is an interesting choice, as Cowell has elected not to use any of the big Hollywood TV agencies and sleb wranglers like PMK, BWR, Rogers & Cowan or Howard Bragman. Electing to keep his PR muscle in New York, he will stay closer to Rupert Murdoch and Sony and away from Peter Rice, who is the Fox man in LA, but something of a “acquired taste” within the News Corp camp.

Hiltzic made his name for managing the reputation of Glenn Beck. Beck is a leading US radio and television host, a conservative political commentator, author, and entrepreneur. He is the host of The Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks; he is also the host of an eponymous cable news show on Fox News Channel.

Hiltzic is apparently a good man and has succeeded brilliantly in keeping Glenn Beck’s career on track after some disastrous comments about Obama, among other gaffes. Beck’s controversial views have quite possibly seriously dented his earning potential, however; despite millions of viewers, more than 200 companies have joined a boycott of Beck’s television program, making it difficult for Fox to sell ads. Hlitzic has worked for Glenn Beck for many years and is a family friend.

X Factor USA is set to start in September 2011. It’s already been trailed on Fox, almost a year before the show goes on air. There were huge promos running over Thanksgiving, during the NFL. This is an indicator of how desperate Simon is to break the show for Fox. It is a central plank for their 2011 autumn schedule. Fox traditionally have issues in Autumn because the other networks have the NFL. At present Fox only have one show in the top 20, Glee.

This all changes when American Idol comes back on air in January, as it takes Fox without fail to the No.1. slot. Next Autumn, Fox are planning to use the X Factor to crank themselves much higher up the ladder. Reportedly, they have committed a $30 million-plus promo budget for X-Factor for a marketing blitz which will roll out over the coming months, which will include billboards and a TV campaign.

Certain media outlets have fallen for the story of Fuller vs. Cowell, in my opinion, that misses the point – it is in fact Fox versus the other networks! Simon has a tough fight; despite the obituary notices, American Idol is still the biggest entertainment show on US TV by a long way, as it has been for the last seven seasons.

Its audience declined 7% last year, which is roughly in line with other shows; it opened last season on 29 million. Interesting that, in comparison, Simon Cowell’s other hyped show in the US – America’s Got Talent opens on about 11 million and reached about 14 million for the final. So if X factor USA starts on anything less than 20 million, it will be a chilling wake up call. The Americans only pay attention to success.

I read Simon Cowell’s Daily Mail chat yesterday, in which he suggested how he would get a bigger audience than American Idol so as to defeat ‘his rival Simon Fuller’. This is nearly as big as the humbug that his film venture (remember that?) was going to rival Disney. Figures suggest that in the US Cowell’s rivals are people like Ellen, Jay Leno, Oprah etc and other hosts / TV personalities.

Fishwives are voicing audible concern within Fox LA that Cowell’s overt style on X Factor may be too much for Americans, who like the soft diet an authentic talent show like American Idol brings them. The worry is that the X Factor style will perceived to be closer to Jerry Springer; too much confrontation, fakery, theatre. Cowell reinvented Saturday night TV here. But can he really reinvent the Barnumesque ballyhoo of X Factor in the US?

So let us hope, for Cowell’s sake, that Matt Hiltzic can keep the wolf from the door and the negativity locked safely away. It’s going to be a huge job, not helped by the assortment of meddlers in the camp. I will be following with interest. An old PR suppress agent once told me “a good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection”. Wisdom indeed! Perhaps Hiltzic is a PR who has contacts within the ‘old’ media but understands the ‘new’. If so, there’s a chance he might just help Cowell big time.

It’s always sad to see someone left so alone in the world, but doubly so with Nearne as it turned out she was a war hero in the Second World War and none of her neighbours knew. A member of the Special Operations Executive during the war, she had parachuted behind German lines, been captured twice and talked her way out of trouble before being incarcerated in a labour camp – which she then escaped from and went on the run until the American troops arrived.

This modest woman spoke to no one about her exploits in the last 20 years of her life and was only saved from a council grave by the discovery of wartime French currency, her MBE and various letters that have now been sent to the Ministry of Defence.

But saddest of all is the sort of stories that are appearing in the tabloids at the moment – Wayne Rooney’s sex life still rules the roost. Once, someone like Eileen Nearne would have commanded their front pages – hers was just the sort of heroism that they used to adore. Now, her heroism is worth nothing to them as it comes without sex, drugs or celebrity to back it up.

They are responding to the need of people obsessed with position to read about themselves or be read about in lieu of a life of one’s own. But of what value are the women who prey on footballers – and the footballers themselves – by comparison to a woman who fought her way across Europe in he name of protecting Britain and then never said a word about it? Her modesty contrasts shockingly with the vulgar and immodest behaviour of people infested with the most toxic forms of celebrity. There seems to be little of that sort of heroism left, in Britain at least.

We will all end up as dust – but it is truly sad that someone as brave and selfless as Eileen Nearne should pass almost unmourned in the newspapers that purport to speak for the majority of the people.

I am beginning to wonder if there is any racism involved here, ingrained in our reaction. The country is in turmoil, but we are busy with shaming and hounding our sportsmen. America is busy too – attempting to stave off a nut with a church to his name who wants to burn the Koran on September 11th. But the PR pressure and energy the American government is expending on saying that this bigot is wrong could surely be better spent helping the Pakistani people. We are talking about a disaster on a magnitude as great if not greater than Haiti. And yet nothing seems to be happening.

So is it a Muslim thing? Is this why the West is just not that fussed about helping Pakistan recover from the floods? I suspect that this is what the so-called ‘forces of evil’ who are currently helping in Pakistan will be telling the people they help. This is their chance to reach out and create more divisions – a PR exercise in igniting the powder keg that Pakistan has become, despite having once been seen as a safe Western ally in the war on terror.

Whilst others conduct psy-ops to infiltrate Pakistan in the name of charity, surely the West are creating further divisions by being seen to do nothing. We need to see the bigger picture – inaction now could lead to the creation of more angry extremists, more jihad, more terror and war.

Sadly, Wayne Rooney really is more interesting to the world at large than aid workers helping in the fields of Pakistan. But is recession and trouble at home really a good enough excuse for allowing further hatred and division to be bred? The polarisation of Pakistan for want of some food, aid, care and awareness would be a PR – and moral – failure of epic proportions.

We sat down for a cup of coffee and I asked her what she was working on. She told me that this was her second Edinburgh and that she was working on three shows for a producer who was going places. Alarm bells went off in my head at this, so I quizzed her a little about her circumstances.

It turns out that, after the 13 hour coach journey up to the Festival, she was bunked down in a flat procured by the producer, which she was sharing with two other people, and that she was earning £100 a week for the entire four week run of the Festival.

This struck me as deeply exploitative – a producer who wouldn’t even stump up the train fare had hooked an enthusiastic young publicist on the promise of greater things to work on if all went according to plan. She thought she had her foot in the door, but these are the sort of opportunities that wither and die as soon as a client makes it big – what actor, after all, would name check their British agent or publicist if they had the opportunity to work in America, where such names would be worthless currency?

I hope I’m wrong in her case, but I suspect not – I saw her the next day and the impossible demands she was getting to work with, on a budget of hope and water, were classic examples of the sort of demands the all-swallowing uber-producers of PR nightmares past might make.

There is too much hope around, and not enough recognition amongst fledgling entertainment publicists that if everything goes well, you will rarely get the credit, whilst if all goes poorly, you will be first in front of the firing squad.

These fledgling publicists need to learn, and learn quickly, that no matter what they do, nothing is big enough or can generate impact fast enough for an unrealistic and unsupportive client. I get a sense there are not many clients running around the Festival with an appetite for brash, brave and iconoclastic campaigns.

Successful producers almost always demonstrate achievement by ruthlessly grabbing all they can at the expense of the little people. Young PR folk are the first to be trampled under foot. My advice to the young publicist in Edinburgh, and everyone starting out in entertainment PR, is to give the middle finger salute to anyone who can’t or won’t pay proper fees and to maintain dignity and integrity at all costs.

What does ‘interesting’ mean, anyway? How do you define interesting? The people seen as interesting in the brave new webworld tend to be the types giving away news about techie developments which is frankly only interesting to a vocal minority.

When I tweeted that Kanye West was following one man from England it was deemed interesting, briefly at least, but few have the capacity to formulate an effective online presence beyond the confines of same-as-the-next-man. Do you try being witty? Wit doesn’t get picked up in America – in fact, I defy anyone to find a really good example of online American wit. Humour, interest and subject matter often get held up at international borders or lost in transit.

The blunt truth is that the people who get retweeted most tend to be those who say you must be interesting without giving a concrete explanation of what interesting actually means; the ones with the killer search engine optimisation skills but little or nothing to actually say.

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.

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!

They have an enormous number of silent supporters waging their PR war for them, and some not-so-silent ones. Take the NeoCon pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz, for example. After the Gulf War, he advised American Jewish leaders to incorporate mention of Iraq into every mention made of Israel because “Saddam will remain a powerful symbol of terror to Americans for a long time to come. A pro-Israeli expression of solidarity with the American people in their successful effort to remove Saddam will be appreciated.”

Israel has a global network of people helping them ride any PR storm. There is always a PR storm and they always seem to ride it. After Gaza residents, in the wake of the Haiti disaster, started a well-documented campaign to send money to Haiti because they were ‘in the same state’, a number of bloggers reporting this were attacked and, in some cases, silenced.

Look at America’s limp response to the attack on the aid ships – in international waters and so an international incident. The White House said that the US “deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained” and that US officials were “currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy”.

If that doesn’t suggest a whole raft of lobbyists to appease behind the scenes, nothing does. And the trouble is that nearly all the PR war is waged almost entirely behind locked doors. It would be interesting to see what changed if transparency were demanded in such matters. I doubt some of the PR advisers, lobbyists and flaks working for Israel would be able to take the international flack if they were exposed to scrutiny.

Speaking of transparency, it’s interesting to see that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has become the ‘BP Oil Disaster’ – such disasters rarely get named after the big companies. They tend to be named after the place they happen. That BP appear to be taking the blame on the chin is either a big PR turnaround on their part or proof that there is nowhere for them to hide. Either way it marks a sea change in their approach to blame. Sadly, it also marks a huge change in the chemistry of the sea off the coast of America. I hope they’re as quick to deal with that as they are to take the blame.

US and UK sport have always been different – from the amount of body armour the Americans wear to play what amounts to rugby to the way the world views the different sports on each side of the Atlantic. Whatever your view of American sport, however, there is no doubt they are well ahead of the game when it comes to using social media in cahoots with big sports events.

You only have to take a cursory look at this year’s Super Bowl to see the difference – this is the year that “social media and the Super Bowl are officially converging” apparently; the year when advertisers, fans, athletes and the NFL are all weighing in with a social media slew of information, opinion and advertising. Twitter is inundated with Super Bowl tweets. And this is for an event that is already swathed in pageantry and hype in the non-digital media.

British sport, by contrast, has only managed to set the social media world alight with the sorry sexual shenanigans of John Terry, the (now ex-) England football captain. And this is in a World Cup year, when you’d hope that the advertisers, fans and athletes would converge in a similar manner to the Americans behind their sport, to push the first vaguely successful football team England’s had in ages towards winning big in South Africa.

But no; the only major trending topic at the moment is Terry’s greed and sex life. In Britain, sport and social media are seemingly united only in gossip, the end result of which is most likely to be the England squad torn apart at the seams.