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.

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.

Miley Cyrus is heading off down the well-trodden path of over-sexualised image that has been presented 1000 times before and is well known to end in ruin at least half the time. Even Kylie has got in on the act, kissing Ana Matronic from the Scissor Sisters; a direct echo of Madonna and Britney’s “lesbian” kiss.

Prince Albert of Monaco is doing a karaoke version of his father by marrying an American celeb, who is a pale imitation of Grace Kelly. And then there’s the Princes, William and Harry: William is currently back with Kate Middleton, whom the press insist shares much in common with his mother, Princess Diana; Harry is off clearing mines in a bid to be like his mother. A Freudian could no doubt get some considerable mileage from the undercurrents created by the media’s presentation of them.

And let’s not forget the endless stream of politicians, like Al Gore and Chris Huhne, running off with younger women in a karaoke of every powerful or rich man before them. Late mid-life crises of this sort have been karaoked for centuries, as any good history book will show you.

Add to this litany the pale imitations that are the current England team: a karaoke version of every footballing failure there’s been in this country. This is the most damning indictment of them; they couldn’t even be bothered to fail with originality and style. And goalkeeper failures are hardly new either. Nor are Frank Lampard and Christine Bleakley, who’d like to be the next Posh and Becks but don’t really have the ability to sing the song in the right tune.

It’s a culture of cliché piled on cliché piled on foundations of quicksand. There’s no better example of this than Katie Price, who has got married again thanks to the largesse of OK magazine and surrounded by the same old tired celebs and who is now a karaoke version of herself.

Does nobody worry that so much in the news has been done before, usually with a little more wit and style? I wonder if the media has been run so ragged it now has the attention span of a goldfish, albeit a goldfish that has embraced the concept of “don’t break your neck trying to be clever”? Karaoke ideas are king.

Perhaps I am being too critical. Perhaps we are simply too busy to be original in this time-compressed age and are, thereby, all allowing complacency to suffocate originality. It’s par for the current course.

Karaoke media culture might irritate me – but it’s only because I know we are all capable of so much more.

Still, at least Green is English, where all he faces is ridicule and crushing, sweaty disappointment. In 1994, Columbian footballer Andrés Escobar was murdered after scoring an own goal in the World Cup. If England fail to progress, Green is likely to be vilified by the myopic soccer tribe in full rhetorical flow and be verbally lumped in with paedophiles, murderers and rapists in bitter conversations down the pub.

This despite the fact that, post-match, Green fronted up his error and bravely faced the media, admitting to the gaffe whilst attempting to take control of the narrative. In PR terms, it was a flawless effort in damage limitation. But, reading the papers today, the media continue to sadistically throw salt onto his open wound. We need a scapegoat and Green is the man of the hour.

Is this continued hysteria evidence of our collective derangement? And if so, what will come of it? The media sustain an overbearing optimism that this wretched bunch of sporting icons can somehow fulfil the nation’s sporting dreams. It reaches such a pitch that one might be easily convinced that winning the World Cup glory would somehow cure cancer.

The repetitive conjuring of the spirit of 1966 is damaging overkill. The pressure fashioned by an unhinged media every four years (assuming that England even manage to qualify, of course) becomes a onerous burden that suffocates any prospect of glory. How can intense media scrutiny be a good thing? It is, without doubt, the single biggest destroyer of any promise of success. The American approach – a few lines on the front page and a bigger report in the sports section – seems a lot healthier.

Alleviating the phenomenon of hype might just might give the team a chance to forget themselves on the pitch and put in a World Cup campaign performance that will surprise and delight. Footballing glory used to be as much about unplanned serendipity as anything else. Can anyone remember that time? It seems an ever more distant memory nowadays and would most likely appear miraculous if it happened in the current media climate.

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.