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.

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.