The New York Times has a fascinating sidebar to the Melania Trump plagiarism story as it turns out that the duplicate passages in Trump’s speech were discovered by an unemployed journalist who was watching the Republican convention from a Los Angeles coffee shop.
The legions of reporters in Cleveland did not discover the cribbed portions of the speech that matched Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention remarks. Even the former Obama aides on hand as TV commentators did not notice the similarities.
It was Jarrett Hill who instantly detected something was amiss when he heard Trump use the phrase, “strength of your dreams.”
Hill
A television journalist who was recently laid off, Hill was watching the convention on his computer from a Starbucks in L.A.
“It kind of made me pause for a minute,” Hill told the Times. “I remembered that line from Michelle Obama’s speech.”
Hill, 31, went to work on his computer, found the clip of Obama’s speech online and discovered that a significant portion of both speeches – not just a single phrase – were alike. He went onto Twitter and announced his discovery, declaring that the speech was a case of plagiarism, and the tweet soon went viral.
The Times reported Hill’s role in the final paragraphs of a detailed piece analyzing where the blame may lie for the disastrous text theft.
CNN is reporting that the Trump campaign doesn’t plan to fire anybody or to take disciplinary action over the controversy. Trump’s aides are trying to blame the dust-up on media bias and they claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign hatched the story.
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The infamous Mr. Astley
In an even stranger twist, some on social media posited that Trump surreptitiously Rickrolled — a common Internet meme involving singer Rick Astley — everyone in the middle of her speech.
“He will never give up,” she said of her husband. “And most importantly, he will never, ever let you down.”
The chorus of the 80s classic sounds very similar: “Never gonna give you up/ Never gonna let you down/ Never gonna run around and desert you.”A bit of background — Rickrolling is where you get someone to unwittingly click on a link to the video of the Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”So, for example, if someone were to tell you to click here, saying it’s another article about Melania Trump, and you click on that link, you would be taken to an Astley video and thus have been Rickrolled.
