Jon Stewart recalls being defensive when criticized for The Daily Show's lack of diversity

Rolling Stone

In an interview with The Breakfast Club on Tuesday, Stewart owned up to his Daily Show's lack of diversity and alluded to a 2010 Jezebel article on the show being a boys' club. After that article came out, Stewart said he remembers "going back into the writer’s room and being like, ‘Do you believe this sh*t? Kevin? Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald?’ Oh…Uh oh. Uh oh.” Stewart added that, at the time, The Daily Show had a policy that hid the names of job applicants, which they thought was “the way to not be sexist and racist.” But when they kept hiring “white dudes from a certain background,” they eventually realized that “the river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia. And you had to say to them, send me women, send me black people. And all of a sudden, women got funny, it just kind of happened — but they’d been funny all along. We just hadn’t actively done enough to mine that.” ALSO: Stewart remembers clashing with Wyatt Cenac, the only black person on staff at the time, after he was criticized for a racist Herman Cain accent.