Jon Stewart admits 'The Daily Show' had a diversity problem — and reveals the key to fixing it

Giving an interview to "The Breakfast Club" this week, comedian Jon Stewart opened up about the challenges he faced with diversity on his team at "The Daily Show," reportedRolling Stone.

Stewart, who has received criticism for relying on an overwhelmingly white and male staff, acknowledged in the interview that, as a powerful and famous white man, he had power over the problem and didn't want to confront his role in it.

“What’s hard about that for people is you get defensive," he said. "Nobody likes to be called on their sh*t, especially when they feel like it’s not really their sh*t. But what you realize is, just stopping active persecution isn’t enough to dismantle. It has to be actively dismantled.” Stewart said that he knew the criticism was valid, recalling “going back into the writer’s room and being like, ‘Do you believe this shit? Kevin? Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald?’ Oh…Uh oh. Uh oh.”

Stewart explained that his office had a policy of hiding applicants' job names, so they wouldn't have direct hints of the race or sex of the people they were hiring, and thought that would be sufficient to correct the problem. However, he gradually came to realize a hard truth: color-blindness doesn't solve racism, because institutional discrimination in other structures of society ensure fewer women and people of color even have the opportunity to apply.

“The river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia," said Stewart. "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.”

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