(This is a Rant. If anyone is offended, well, tough. You don’t have to read this. Having said that, no on-topic comments will be removed from this article.)<\/p>\n
George Best: I’m sure some people are genuinely sorry he’s dead. I’m also sure that he was a decent footballer in his day, too, although that was well before my time. That said, this is not really about that. It’s about media manipulation of the emotions of weak-minded individuals for a purpose that I’m currently unclear about.<\/p>\n
Why did the media bombard every bulletin for the last three weeks of his life with “He’s nearly dead” and then have a three-hour programme to broadcast the funeral? This all just seems ridiculously out of proportion and out of context. Many people had forgotten all about him until he became ill recently: many people resented him having a liver transplant when it was suspected (and subsequently turned to be the case) that he would continue drinking excessively.<\/p>\n
When exactly did he turn into such an icon? This just seems to be something engineered by “the media”, and I’m not entirely sure who I mean by “the media”, but that’s the only handle I can put on it. Personally, every single person I’ve spoken to about George Best thinks that the TV news and newspaper coverage of a dying person’s last days of life were scrutinised far more than necessary. He’s always been well-respected as a footballer, but nothing else since then has gained much respect: he was sent to prison for drink-driving and assaulting a policeman; he had further convictions for drink-driving and was banned from driving; there were also allegations of wife-beating.<\/p>\n
This strikes me as another dose of “Diana hysteria”, no-one cared until she was dead, and even then the media whipped up a frenzy of largely false sentiment. Diana suddenly became “The People’s Princess”. What’s George Best? The People’s Footballer? The People’s Alcoholic?<\/p>\n
He was a good footballer for a few years: he was an alcoholic wreck for the next 30 years. Why are the media trying to make the population at large care about him so much? And idolise him in this way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(This is a Rant. If anyone is offended, well, tough. You don’t have to read this. Having said that, no on-topic comments will be removed from this article.) George Best: I’m sure some people are genuinely sorry he’s dead. I’m also sure that he was a decent footballer in his day, too, although that was… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}