Tweet by job-seeking journalist set off plagiarism firestorm
CLEVELAND — One possible winner from this week’s Republican gathering got his convention bounce in a coffee shop, 3,700 kilometres away from the site where Donald Trump became a presidential nominee.
This convention-conqueror was a laid-off journalist hanging out in a Los Angeles Starbucks, chatting with friends on Facebook while streaming video of the exercise in democracy unfolding.
That’s where Jarrett Hill broke the most-talked-about story of his career and managed to scoop 15,000 journalists in Cleveland with news that produced many thousands more headlines.
He is the first to have realized that a Republican convention speech plagiarized the wife of the current Democratic president. The immediate result: After seeking work for 15 months, he has started receiving a number of invitations to chat about possible job offers.
“I’ve been bombarded with messages telling me how many job offers I was going to get,” Hill said in an interview.
“I’m not exactly sure (how many are solid leads) because I’m still running through a bunch of emails. I would say a handful of emails have expressed a strong interest in having a conversation. Let’s see where it goes.”
He last worked as an ABC producer in Florida. He has been freelancing since he was laid off. An irony of this week’s events, he says, is that if he had actually been busy working the convention instead of sitting at Starbucks he might’ve been too tied up to indulge the curiosity that led him to the news.
Hill was listening to Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, when he heard something that tickled his memory receptors. It was an eightyear-old quote from Michelle Obama he’d liked enough to take note at the time: “It kind of came back, like familiar song lyrics.”
So he Googled, “Michelle Obama convention,’” found the old quotes, posted them online, and lit a brush fire that rippled through the convention.
His subsequent tweet, “Melania must’ve liked Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech, since she plagiarized it,” has since been forwarded more than 3,300 times. “(After) around 600 (retweets) is when it started to freak me out. I was like, ‘Something’s happening with this tweet.’ It’s completely out of my hands at this point.”
He closed his backpack, left, and by the time he got home it had been shared a few hundred more times.
Hill said the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. He has received some angry messages, but they’ve been rare. He also forced the Trump campaign into a confusing two days where it indignantly denied the plagiarism, then finally fessed up and blamed it on an error in communication with Melania’s speech writer. Polls over the coming days will show whether the Trump campaign also emerges from this conversion as a winner. A campaign typically gets a post-convention bump of a few percentage points in public support.
Trump said Tuesday: “We created one of the most successful conventions in the history of conventions.” As for the party establishment sticks-in-the-mud calling it a modern-day gong show, Trump said he couldn’t care less about their support. Same for the anti-establishment Sen. Ted Cruz, his primary runner-up: “I don’t want his endorsement. Ted, stay home, relax.”
His critics within the party are skeptical it was so successful. One said Trump squashed the potential benefit by stepping all over his message each day. First it was the plagiarism, followed by denials, then an admission. The economy-themed second night was mostly about bashing Hillary Clinton’s character. Then came the Cruz non-endorsement and Trump telling the New York Times he might not defend a NATO ally invaded by Russia.