Peter Schiff Slams Daily Show for Dishonest 'Hit Job'

Back on January 28, Comedy Central's The Daily Show ran a piece on the minimum wage debate where guest Peter Schiff, opposing a minimum wage increase, appeared to be the heartless villain. Now Schiff is calling out the show for running a "hit job" on him.

"After watching 'The Daily Show' segment for the first time since it aired, I realized it was an even bigger hit job than I first realized. Jon Stewart's staff constructed my sentence like Dr. Frankenstein pieced together his monster," Schiff wrote on his blog. In an interview with Mediaite, he expounded on his four-hour interview with the show.

As NewsBusters documented, the show is overwhelmingly hostile to conservatives. Schiff's appearance was just one of 11 January segments that targeted conservatives, with only one report mocking a liberal. Four segments mocked both sides.

Schiff claimed that the interview was four hours long and that the Daily Show dug up bits and pieces of his answers "to piece together a meticulously edited segment that would portray me in the worst possible light."

And although the show promised that no answer of his would be edited out of context, Schiff claims they did just that: "In one case, fragments from several unrelated sentences were pieced together to form what seemed to be a continuous statement that I never actually spoke. Statements, made hours apart, were juxtaposed to create the false impression that they were related."

It's not the first time the Daily Show has been accused of selective editing. Mollie Hemingway of Ricochet listed grievances voiced by multiple of the show's interviewees, quite similar to the complaints made by Schiff.

Matt Hadro
Matt Hadro