 Jay Leno |
When WND columnist and author Craig R. Smith wrote a commentary urging Americans to be more positive, he had no idea his piece would take on a life of its own, spreading wildly across the Internet as a monologue ascribed to Jay Leno and landing on Snopes.com as the fourth hottest urban legend.
Now officials at NBC, after mistakenly threatening to sue Smith for plagiarism, are trying to sort out the story, with one assistant suggesting Smith come on the “Tonight” show as Leno’s guest.
Smith told WND that since January, not a single week has gone by in which he hasn’t received at least five e-mails about the column.
One friend, unaware of the true author, wrote to Smith an enthusiastic “you-gotta-read-this” e-mail with the piece attached.
“I got a belly laugh out of that one,” Smith said. “I’ve had my own friends send it to me saying, I didn’t know Jay was this conservative.”
Smith, CEO of Swiss America, is co-author of “Black Gold Stranglehold: Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil,” published by WND Books.
In the November 2006 column, Smith writes about a Newsweek poll indicating 67 percent of Americans are unhappy with the direction the country is headed. He encourages readers to “stop buying the negativism you are fed everyday by the media. Shut off the TV, burn Newsweek, and use the New York Times for the bottom of your bird cage. Then start being grateful for all we have as a country. There is exponentially more good than bad.”
The most common form of the viral e-mail replaces Smith’s conclusion, a quote from Malcolm Forbes, with a line from a Leno monologue: “With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?”
Leno’s riff actually was made in October 2005, a year before Smith wrote his column. Leno was talking about the emotional climate in America, Snopes says, shortly after Hurricane Katrina and amid fears of terrorism and bird flu and a national debate about the Pledge of Allegiance and its reference to “under God.”
 Craig R. Smith |
By March, the original piece had been altered through multiple e-mail forwards, with the closing paragraphs removed and Jay Leno’s joke appended to the end. Inserted at the beginning was the line “Jay Leno hits the nail on the head,” giving the mistaken impression the entire piece was written by the entertainer.
Smith said he first became aware something had happened to his column in January when a WND reader wrote him saying he had just seen it on a blog, credited to the blogger.
Smith wrote to the blogger, who immediately replied with an apology, saying he had seen it in an e-mail and thought it had no author.
The WND columnist then did some Internet searches and discovered at least a dozen instances in which someone had misrepresented his piece.
He began e-mailing the people responsible. One replied with an expletive, retorting, in effect, “Who are you to tell me not to copy something written by Jay Leno?”
That was the first Smith had heard of the Leno connection, and before long, that version was all over the Internet.
Smith said he contacted Leno’s “Tonight” show office and was told NBC, in fact, had been hit with a flood of e-mails and some phone calls about the column. Within the next day, Smith’s office received a call from the network’s legal department instructing him to remove the article from his website, thinking he was running a column that plagiarized Leno.
Smith’s publicist explained the situation to NBC, politely informing the network it had the situation backwards.
An NBC attorney acknowledged the mistake, noting Leno himself was aware of the viral e-mails.
Smith said he was given an unofficial invitation Tuesday by an NBC assistant to be a guest on the “Tonight” show, explaining Leno makes the final decisions.
But Smith’s agent, Ed Lubin, told WND a guest appearance isn’t likely, as officials close to Leno still seem confused about what actually happened. Lubin said he tried to explain the situation to one NBC official, who kept saying, “You know, we could sue you.” After 40 minutes of trying to explain Snopes.com and other intracacies of the story, Lubin said he gave up and ended the conversation.
WND spoke with Leno’s assistant but was referred for comment to NBC’s publicity department, which has not replied.
Smith told WND the story points to the amazing power of the Internet.
“This thing has taken on a life of its own,” he said, noting Friday he had just received another notification of his column running on a mass e-mail list.
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