Jon Stewart says The Daily Show is "better" under Trevor Noah, especially with its inclusion of diverse voices

People

"It's not meant as a denigration of me," Stewart told Howard Stern of his praise for his successor. "The evolution of show was also about opening our eyes to some of the realities of business around us." Stewart pointed out that it took a long time for his show to not only diversify, but to pay interns as part of that diversification process. "The radio and television business is run by rich people from Westchester," he said. "And the reason that it is is because when you hire people from this business, you generally hire from the interns that you formerly had on the show. But any intern that could afford to take three months off from college and spend that time polishing your grapes is going to come from a wealthy background, so all the people you were hiring were all socioeconomically at a very high level. So it took us a long time to fix a lot of those tributaries. By paying the interns, suddenly you're getting a much more diverse group of people that are coming in." Stewart acknowledged that for a long time, their initiatives were just "diversity for diversity's sake," adding: "It was, 'We don't have enough women writers, let's hire a woman. We don't have enough black writers, let's hire a black person. But what we realized is we weren't changing the system, we were just granting access to a club everybody should have had access to in the first place."