I have always believed there has been a calculus of public vs. private interest, but this week has proved that the law is broken. The wider world is not interested in the deliberations of a dusty-wigged UK high court judge. The legal framework must try and understand the new age of free, libertarian speech especially when they are considering a celebrity’s position on his or her commercial value. There appears to be a very obvious point: the law is useless! It’s broken and unenforceable.

For the record, I do believe in a privacy law, but only if the conduct and careful appliance of fame is not undone by unacceptable behaviour. Legal muscle has its place but it cannot solely or independently save a career and reputation meltdown – the hapless attempts to halt the inexorable momentum of social media will now thrust the guilty more quickly into to the sewer of purposeful disparagement.

A few years ago I viewed, with some trepidation, the onset of this kind of web content, the sort that would unleash a revolution of new possibilities. I spent time preaching to agents and celebrities about the new dangers of the age. My protestations fell on deaf ears.

Few public figures learnt anything from the wretched and very public legal sagas surrounding John Terry and Wayne Rooney a year ago. Not even a downturn in their earning potential from sponsors and brands seemed to make a mark. As yet another hapless celebrity attempts to use the force of the law to turn the internet tide and save a tattered reputation, it is time to face some hard facts.

The celebrity industry is gigantic, Paris Hilton no less is by Forbes estimated Paris Hilton value around $30 and $50 million two years ago. We learnt last year Wayne Rooney earns £760000 a year from his image rights. These are big figures and this is why public figures will invest in expensive legal council to protect their privacy. Especially if the story doesn’t fit the projected brand truth

We are living in an age of experimental democracy. I have stood and watched, with some trepidation, journalism and technology battering against the walls of the law. Recent cases have arguably set a bad and confusing precedent. Famous and public cases have created destabilisation via the online world. The PR profession is grappling with the change.

Arguably, the social media world is destroying truth. PR folk recognize it’s an absolute fact that once you’re in the public eye everything changes.

The revolution in celebrity has changed the rules of engagement and the role of the celebrity has changed. This is the modern age, the age of the super-injunction, the age when celebrities want to keep their dirty laundry in bomb- and journalist-proof cages so that not even the slightest whiff of scandal can escape. Celebrity is now more than just playing in a team or starring on the screen. The public investment in the brand and therefore brand truth is more important than a spun image. The days of suppressing the facts are over.

If the brand behaves in a certain way then that’s its brand truth. The new social media age will out the truth, will focus on the authentic profile. If that isn’t the way certain public figures want it to be, they may find they have to change: they should realise that openly threatening will be unlikely to encourage investment from sponsors.

Legal firms specializing in this arena at the moment try to apply chloroform to the faces of troublesome editors. There isn’t enough anaesthetic, or the means to apply it, to smother the web. As for spraying threatening letters in a bid to suppress the facts, this is hat so old it’s fossilised when thousands of tweeters are registering support or outrage and have the ability to pass on the information. You can’t sue or stop them all.

Those celebs who engage in a sensible lifestyle and recognize that fame is a curse invest wisely in agents of communication. They weigh up their options professionally and seek to communicate their brand ethos. Of course they deserve to be protected from the lies and the defamers. How? Well, there’s the rub. We have entered an age of democratic experimentation, so it is time to come to terms with this truth of the situation facing then and therefore their own truth.

It’s no surprise that many of the major A list Hollywood names prefer the council of a wise old grey haired PR wrangler, a cautionary breed schooled in the laws of human error. A great flack is part shrink, part wise council, part foot soldier; someone not afraid of the blood or the battle. A listers will defer to someone who has a trust of the medium they work in.

The digital swirl has changed the game, so the provision for translucency and an ability to find a way to manage an enormous global community that has an interest in his clients brand is vital. There must be a place for sensible conversations with the media, both on- and offline, that might undo their clients.

Few UK public figures invest in long-term media management. Instead they prefer to pay eye-watering fees to a class of lawyer who is not graced with the skills of media negotiation. We are in an age where trust is thin the ground. Brute force commands a premium.

Good PR folk are trying to address the challenges that face them in a world where social networks are revolutionizing the planet. Modern media relations are about reaching out, not flexing legal muscle. Celebrities and public figures must invest in help that knows how to engage a whole new generation of consumers, whose values are being reshaped almost daily by their new social dialogue. Of course it’s not as easy as that, as the furore over someone posting information on Twitter about people who have allegedly taken out super-injunctions proves.

Crises come and crises go: the trick for a good flack is to develop a pleasant outward demeanour for their client. If the client can live up to it they’ll do well, but in these Twitter-fuelled days a caddish serial offender who tries to hide will be found out. Twitter makes a PR’s job harder, not easier.

The days of things being suppressed for decades are over, thanks to Twitter. We’re not living in old Hollywood any more. It is for everyone to change his or her ways of thinking; time for attitude, heart and a sense of proportion instead of craven process.

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.

It was a rather curious and disappointing night; most of the questions from the floor were from people seeking insight via anecdote and I found myself missing the grillings I got from wannabe journalists 15 years ago about the nature of PR. The media has changed, without doubt – celebrity has come to be a sop they use to send us to sleep easily at night, a sort of weak-horlicks fairytale with all the calories and morals removed.

When it comes to celebrity, the media are too often an industry dependent on lives going wrong so they can print half truths and soap operas. The modern media can’t seem to find – or find the time for – the voices of those contributing something of worth to society. Everything is too prearranged. All those bright young things who wanted to be journalists now want to be in PR, as there’s always money to be made there.

But critical opinion is being lost. Does no one want to know how photos of John Terry and his wife in Dubai – which has strict privacy laws – were taken? It had to be by careful arrangement but no one questioned this last night. Everybody knows everything and nothing – the useful details are lost beneath a swath of cosy anecdote.

Debate is at an all time low – it is not even fashionable in politics, as Gordon Brown’s giving over of himself to the personal via the medium of his TV interview with Piers Morgan the other day proves. That and the fact that the political parties are all trying to bag celebs to help win the upcoming election (click here to see a piece on this in the Telegraph for which I gave a quote) rather than debate and think their way out of their problems.

I’m well aware that the world is constantly changing, as it should, but to have young wannabe publicists and journalists sidestep entirely a proper discourse and just accept the nature of things as they are on the surface is disturbing. There’s always money to be made – asking questions won’t, in the long run, stem the flow of that income. The power of questions is that, by questioning, one can change things. True constructive analysis and debate is the only way for the media, PR and the world to move forward – equilibrium need not mean stultification.

Next up after that is a debate at the University of Westminster on Monday, February 15th on Celebrity Brands: Desire, Dollars and Danger? It’s an equally topical debate, asking if we are near the limit of public interest in celebrities, or if there is no limit, whether celebrities mirror or lead society and if they need or deserve greater protection from the media. Bearing in mind the Tiger Woods case and the more recent John Terry meltdown, we’ll also be discussing what the risks and benefits for brands of associating with celebrities are.

Chewing over the issue with me are Max Clifford, Julian Linley (ex-Heat editor and now creative director of Bauer Media), and the advertising guru Trevor Beattie. The debate will be chaired by Trevor Morris, Visiting Professor of Public Relations at the University of Westminster, and the co-author of ‘PR- A Persuasive Industry?’ It should be a fascinating evening.

“The publicist Mark Borkowski, a Chelsea supporter, said the Terry case would send a ’shiver’ through football. He said he would have advised Terry to hand the armband back before being stripped of it and said advisers should have been aware of the dubious PR value of the footballer accepting a ‘Dad of the Year’ award from Daddies Sauce last summer. ‘Where else in the world do you get the scuzzy standards British football has got? The players have too much time on their hands and they are surrounded by sycophants,’ he said. ‘They think they can throw a lawyer at it and away it goes. I hope this will have woken players up to the nature of some of the people around them.’

To read the full article, click here.

I think I’ve now spotted the one major difference between the two breeds of footballer on either side of the Atlantic: the British footballer, at the height of his game and money-earning potential, tends to be a rock-em-sock-em hedonist, in it only for the lifestyle, the thrill, the women, the ability to be so rich they can get away with it. American footballers, on the other hand, tend to be do-gooders. Most importantly, they are encouraged to be so.

Take the Walter Payton Man of the Year award for example; every year an American footballer is named Man of the Year for his charitable and voluntary work outside football. The winner’s prize, apart from the honour, is a $25,000 donation by the committee to the footballer’s favourite charity. All 31 runners-up can nominate a charity, each of whom will be given $1000. The PR value is enormous, in that it allows the public to sympathise with very highly paid sports personalities.

British footballers, bereft of any encouragement to be public spirited, tend not to appear at all charitable. The only example of a charitable player that springs to mind immediately is Niall Quinn, who used his testimonial match, on retiring from playing football at Sunderland, to raise over £1 million for charity, an act so surprising that it won him several awards, including an honorary MBE. Most lower rung footballers use such games to line their pockets against retirement. The higher paid they are, the less likely they are to be seen giving to anyone but their immediate circle.

I’d suggest that it is high time the FA consider the American awards-for-charitable-work PR model for British football, as the ongoing culture amongst players of wealth without responsibility, of sleaze and selfishness, is quite capable of killing the sport entirely in the eyes of the British public.

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.

Money is the acne on the face of football and with teenage afflictions comes teenage behaviour. Young men with that much loose power stuffed in their wallets are prone to go a little crazy and Terry is no exception. Money and hormones repress morals – every time, without exception.

Top-flight footballers are a breed apart thanks to the astonishing amounts of money they take home; the offspring of a bestial union between money and sport. They should not be held up as exemplars of any sort of moral code. And don’t forget that great footballers make great targets for super-agents who want to make their percentage, for wannabe WAGS with eyes on the dream ticket these players represent, for clubs who require their pound of flesh. Football is as much about milking the cash cows as it is about sport. If not more.

The trouble is that top-flight footballers are getting too much cash, and too little of actual value to help them live with the amounts of money being thrown at them. Clubs and agents smile grimly when something goes wrong, say that lads will be lads and move on to the next golden egg-laying goose who can kick a ball. They rarely stop to consider encouraging an education for their ball-kicking prodigies, or taking the time to instill a code of reasonable conduct in them, or helping them consider investment policies that go beyond the purely selfish. Usually, they just use money and muscle to try and silence the media when things go wrong.

People like John Terry, Wayne Rooney et al are ordinary boys taken from ordinary lives and thrust into an overpaid, over-privileged world where the sky appears to be the limit. They are given no chance to acclimatize but are nonetheless expected to behave as if they’d been raised to virtue by kindly nuns. Who loses out when they can’t do that?

Should footballers be held up as great examples of sportsmanship? There’s no such thing as a true footballing Corinthian anymore – money has seen to that. Thinking that these values can exist in the modern sports arena is ludicrous – modern athletes are part and parcel of the quest to find that dark foreboding pit that is the seventh circle of Celebrity Hell. This type of human being is not at their best off the field, surrounded by super-agents, super-wages and access to super-injunctions when things go wrong.

All Terry can do is to try and communicate contrition, communicate a human side and demonstrate that, over time, he will change – and mean it! What will he learn if he is pursued into quitting by a vengeful media just for the sake of a story? Not much, I’d suggest; the only dignity left in football is in the game itself. Football is barely capable of losing more than it already has.

At the moment, the only winners are the men in charge of the money. The best PR they could get would be from putting in more than they take out of the sport – and I don’t just mean financially.