We will disagree. I've followed PMF and not TJMK (too creepy) so if it was on the latter I wouldn't know. Certainly a few of the extreme wackos might have said anything but the main argument has never been that he was paid (Moore). I went back and looked but couldn't find anything, which I'm claiming as definitive.
If you recall Moore was working at Pepperdine and the PGP cheered wildly when he was terminated. I don't remember them saying that it wouldn't hurt him because of the pay check from Marriott.
The heart of the PR myth was the control of the media, particularly in the US
There were lots of commenters that expressed how hot she was. I doubt anyone would say that was the only reason, even if it was an influence.
Yet part of your argument, remember I said "part", is that this PR project was no myth.
From my reading on this, the growth of the PR Muth was inversely proportional to the influence both Barbie Nadeau and Andrea Vogt had in the US. They were the ones complaining that after a while they had "no access to the family", indeed that will be a subtheme of Winterbottom's film about the media circus which Nadeau sold to him.
Nadeau and Vogt continue to blame the family for losing their influence over the Seattle PI (Vogt) and Newsweek/CNN (Nadeau). Nadeau eventually figured out that if she was to properly monetize this for herself, she had to "behave herself" when on air.
When writing for The Beast, or writing her awful book "Student Killer" she showed no such good behaviour. Threesomes and the student drug culture of Perugia took centre stage. The more student threesomes the better.
But the "PR Supertanker" for them was a way to excuse that they were no longer listened to. Look what's happened in the UK press in the last 2 years, especially since the Leveson Inquiry, hearings and evidence presented as to how the tabloids and media players in the UK were sometimes actually determining the shape of police investigations, based on which would play better in the press!
True, the Kercher murder was a minor subset of all that, but the Daily Mail's brief internet-flash in Oct 2011 of how
"Knox reacts to Hellmann's guilty verdict by slumping in her seat," did make the Leveson inquiry. The Editor of the Daily Mail had to cover for his staff on that one.
You will disagree, I know that. In my opinion you are locked into a very early Seattle-based view of things, and have not moved much since.