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.

I’ve been drowning my ennui
in tequila, beer and noise,
trying to float the bubble
football blows and then destroys

I’ve been drowning my ennui.
I’ve been blotting the despair
that’s been welling up inside me
since England were laid bare.

I’ve been drowning my ennui
in lager laced with lime
and it tastes a little salty
but the drowning feels sublime.

PLAY THE GAME, LADS, AND LET’S TALK.

So then, after our completely predictable exit from Euro 2004 during the summer, England’s footballers are now trying to qualify for the World Cup in 2006, and what hard work they’re making of it. They didn’t play too badly against Poland and won the match 2 – 1, but then decided, in an act of childish petulance, that they weren’t going to talk to the spiky media because someone had written some shittythings about them since their epic draw last week against the steely might and legendary footballing skills of…Austria.

Come on lads… do we need another own goal? No we don’t, so please don’t create PR disasters off the pitch: your performance on it is too often quite sufficient to get the flak. Aren’t your fame and your money sufficient? Isn’t it enough that you’ll earn in a year more than most of your fans will earn in two lifetimes? No, you don’t understand, but perhaps we don’t understand you either.

Inside football there’s always been an attitude that if you’ve never actually played the game at the top level, you’ll never really grasp it, or the way players think about it. To be trusted you need to have been bloodied by the relentless pressure of the professional game, and that’s where Sven Goran Ericsson scores so highly with his England squad. While sports correspondents and fans may see the players as bit part actors in an on-going soap opera, the Head Coach has to concentrate on balancing them as competitive footballers, trying to make the best of their individual traits and ball-skills as he merges them all into a winning team.

High-minded stuff, all concentrating on what happens on the pitch and at the training ground. The trouble is that nowadays so much of the life of a footballer is lived elsewhere. In restaurants, in bars, in public and in front of the TV cameras, and how few footballers are able to cope. But Sven, need we be reminded, has been coping with his own media-management challenge. When the England manager’s sex life becomes the story, as it did over the summer, you know there’s a problem.

In the USA they understand this. Their hugely-paid black, urban basketball stars have professional media coaching like politicians or pundits, so instead of being either cliché-spouting ‘over the moon’ parrots or completely gauche and tongue-tied youths, any comment they might be asked to make in public, win or lose, appears thoughtful, sincere, and contributes to the overall PR of their team. They’re taught to respect the media’s role in the whole picture, to keep good-humoured, win or lose, and let their position as flawed gods work in their favour by the simple use of charm.

So the England team need a bit of help managing their media profile. The days of football journalists researching stories about football and having them appear on the football pages are fast disappearing. The Game is front page news now, yet beyond Beckham, Owen and a handful of others, the cast don’t think of themselves as responsible role models, hence the thoughtlessness of their press boycott on Wednesday night.

And you can hardly blame them when, behind their club gates, they’re shielded and cosseted and rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. Just occasionally you might be bollocked by the Assistant Coach for staying out too late, or by the Head Coach for getting into the tabloids for some non-footballing reason, but it’s hardly parenting. It’s not what your father would say if you started behaving like a prima donna around the house and refused to speak to your granny.

I realise it’s not exactly relaxing being an international footballer, but perhaps they need reminding of the mechanic by which they’ve been elevated to such eminence in this celebrity-struck society of ours. It’s because fans pay money at club and league level, and pay it through the nose. Their fans pay their salaries, week after week, funding the exotic lifestyles of this squad of young men who took it upon themselves to deny those same fans access to their feelings immediately following a most welcome England victory. We urgently need to talk.

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.

His departure, from an extremely well paid job, sends the clearest possible signal to the paper’s editorial – and to the paper’s readers – that he is serious when he says: “I think this story goes against the national interest because the country is behind the 2018 bid, in which a lot of people invested a hell of a lot of time.”

Gary Lineker has revealed himself as a British sporting hero once again, thanks to his actions. I wonder if the Mail on Sunday will run the next part of its story about Lord Triesman this coming weekend. Can they really allow themselves to be seen to be going against the national interest? I can’t wait to see…

It’s worth bearing in mind that, had this been a high-ranking politician, people would be doing all they could to find out whether Jacobs had planned this and would be doing all they could to destroy her. As it stands, it is unlikely to get investigated fully and the only true losers will be football fans – particularly if Triesman’s unguarded slurs on the Spanish and Russians lead to the UK not hosting the 2018 World Cup.

Nobody in the media will follow this through to the bitter end – and certainly no one will investigate Max Clifford’s role too deeply, as he’ll surely be coming with another story that packs the same sort of carefully gathered emotional punch that sells shedloads of papers.

It’s an absolutely shocking state of affairs if we have come to a point where everyone knows the value of kiss and tell and where anyone who wants it has the know-how to leverage the most amount of money out of the media, regardless of the damage it could cause. Even those that do not know what to do know where to turn to get it done: Max Clifford’s door.

But it’s a terrible, self-defeating state to be in if the media and all the people feeding it such choice titbits are concerned about is a quick profit without any consideration for the good of the nation as a whole.

This is a story that highlights the lack of investment in PR at the highest level. There’s an awful lot of bollocks talked about stories that are ‘so important’ that you can do trades with the papers on them, with shadowy publicists portrayed as Fagin types hand-rubbing and smirking in the background. This is mostly absurd – an exercise in scapegoat making.

A good publicist is counsellor and conscience – a Hollywood hybrid of shrink and media hound – and should protect their client. They have always been looking to the long game rather than the easy buck; the reinvention of the client to keep them in the limelight for years rather than to just take a cut from one hefty payment and then move on.

The media is profit-driven – these stories would wither up and die if people simply stopped buying the papers that carried them. People have complained that the Mail on Sunday is ‘ruining England’s chances’ in the World Cup and of hosting the World Cup in eight years’ time. The papers are after a profit; they would be forced to write something new if the people who complained stopped buying the tabloids, instead of moaning and then meekly buying up the next salacious crumbs of gossip.

The power to stop this is in the hands of the public – you choose what stories you want to read. I expect that circulation will creep up in the wake of this story, however – despite the litany of complaints.

It is depressing, too, that people are willing to go to the lengths that Jacobs has – what was she thinking? What possessed her? The “flame-haired 37-year-old with an impressive academic background” will surely rue the day she sold her story. Football tribalism carries a long collective memory for hurts and she has been set up as cannon fodder for this story.

If the FA’s spin-meisters don’t get the World Cup bid back on track, she will surely end up being seen as Eve to Triesman’s addled, buffoonish Adam and will end up suffering the same fate as Faria Alam.

It’s sad that old men, going into high office, still let power rush through them like a particularly potent, heady aphrodisiac. Perhaps they should be castrated before they take the role – or at least be forced to take bromide tea for the duration of their roles. And if that’s too extreme, perhaps they should have a good PR person embedded with them whilst they operate in public life.

The phrase ‘public life’ is a misnomer if ever there was one – the more one is in it, the less one knows about the lives of the public, which allows the sort of foolish mistakes that Triesman has made to thrive. The corridors of power are dark and shadowy. A good PR person could throw light on the way the world works and, most importantly, protect the power-crazed duffers from themselves.

And if that seems too much of an expense, why not just bring more women into such positions of power? I am certain that far fewer stories like these would crop up if there were more women as chief execs. But can you imagine the faces of the FA if you tried to push more women into their corridors of power? Not to mention those of the journalists at the Mail on Sunday…