Peter Schiff Talks To Mediate About The Daily Show and Mininum Wage Hijinks

Last
week, I posted about investment guru and commentator Peter Schiff’s

recent experience on The Daily Show. Talking about the
minimum wage, Schiff stepped in all sorts of doo, some of it
self-inflicted (e.g., such as suggesting that the “mentally
retarded” would be willing to work for $2.00 an hour) and some of
it classic Daily Show sandbagging.

Schiff talks to Mediaite about his experience on the show and
says the producers misrepresented their editing process to him
substantially:

Schiff was shocked when he saw the finished product. “They
took little pieces and rearranged them, all designed to make me
look bad,” he added with an unmistakable hint of
betrayal.

“They succeeded in making me look bad,” he asserted. He adds
that he and his brother have requested that The Daily
Show release the entire four-hour interview, though they
are not holding out much hope that this will occur.

While Schiff said that he thinks both Stewart and The
Daily Show are “funny” and that the host has a “great
sense of humor” and is a “nice guy,” he asserted that the program
underserves its audience.

I agree that the segment on the
minimum wage wasn’t particularly sharp. That’s not just because I
disagree with the overall point of it. Despite Schiff playing into
their hands by suggesting that the “mentally retarded” would be
happy to work for $2.00 an hour, overall the bit seemed very forced
and overly broad in its humor. The fast-food workers event they
visited wasn’t even about jacking the federal iminimum wage from
$7.25 to $8.00 or even $10 an hour – it was about doubling wages to
$15.50. I suspect that even strong supporters of minimum wage hikes
balk at the idea of doubling salaries. (Reason TV’s coverage of the
“strike,” in which various protesters talk about how fast-food
chains offered them jobs despite limited English and work
experience, is online
here).

On his own website, Schiff has released a producer’s email to
his brother Andrew to bolster the case that the show’s manhandling
of him wasn’t fully on the up and up:

From: [redacted]
[mailto:xxxxxx@thedailyshow.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2013 4:13
PM
To: Andrew Schiff
Subject: RE: FW: The Daily Show

We NEVER edit out of context.  Meaning we never ever
show responses to a question we never asked.  For starters it
LOOKS BAD!  But in all seriousness it’s not our prerogative to
attack our interview subjects & slander them (unless they say
really horrible, awful, racist things… but last I checked Peter
doesn’t say such things!).

The general idea is to pretend this is a real news
interview & correct our correspondent when he/she asks goofy
questions.  Our questions usually come from misunderstanding
the other side’s arguments, for example.  We want our
interview subject to play the straight guy & that way they look
normal & we look like the fool.

In this case Samantha Bee is our correspondent. 
She’ll take things she heard at these fast food strikes &
report them back to Peter.  Peter tells Sam why she may be
mistaken, or what the strikers aren’t taking into account,
etc.  That’s the general idea.  And we’ll go over all of
this before we start up the cameras next week.  (Peter &
Jena can also discuss these concerns over the phone
tomorrow.)

But rest assured– NOTHING will be edited out of
context.

Yeah, well, that didn’t work out so well for Schiff. Who grants
that he should have known better. It’s always interesting to see
how media gets made, isn’t it?

Here’s The Daily Show segment with Schiff: