The Tonight Show will make amends for stealing "Taylor Swift Is Surprised" montage

NBC and The Tonight Show have acknowledged that they essentially stole a recent video montage of Taylor Swift’s invariably slackjawed reactions to the many trophies lobbed her way, after the pair of VH1 bloggers who created said montage complained. Rich Juzwiak and Kate Spencer published their popular video “Taylor Swift Is Surprised” last Tuesday, after which they say they were contacted by Sean O’Rourke—a research coordinator for The Tonight Show and possibly some guy who writes snarky news stories on the Internet—who expressed interest in using it during Swift’s appearance.

At the time of their conversation, Juzwiak made it clear that he and Spencer expected to be properly credited for their work, but during Swift’s interview segment Monday night, Jay Leno simply introduced the clip with, “We put together a little montage of you being surprised,” as though he himself had spent hours in the editing room instead of polishing his Bentleys with a diaper. After not seeing their names anywhere in the closing credits either, Juzwiak called the show out on his blog, saying, “Newsflash to the mainstream media: just like you have actual human beings making you work, so does the Internet! A little respect for the people providing your content would be nice!” It’s been that sort of week. However, after hearing about his complaint, NBC said it would properly credit the makers of the video on tonight’s broadcast, so in this case, at least, the Internet won.

Here is “Taylor Swift Is Surprised” followed by the Tonight Show segment, during which Swift explains that her state of perpetual shock is based on a longstanding philosophy of not being too presumptuous, and because she’s really just a simple country girl at heart-shaped hand sign.