The Daily Show host shared his plans with The New Yorker‘s David Reminck at the magazine’s New Yorker Festival on Sunday. The Daily Show airs on Paramount-owned Comedy Central, but Stewart’s current contract with the network is up at the end of this year. While some may have expected him to take the Sheridan route—the host did not mince words when it came to his disappointment in Paramount’s “devastating,” “shameful” $16 million settlement with President Trump earlier this year—Stewart argued that “it’s not as clear cut as all that.” “They’ve already done things that I’m upset about. But then if I had integrity, maybe I would stand up and go, ‘I’m out,'” he said, Daily Beast reports. “Or maybe the integrity thing to do would be to stay in it and keep fighting in the foxhole.”
Stewart has been fighting both the current administration and his own employers since Trump took office in January. In July, he accused the company of cowing to “the fear that you and your advertisers have with $8 billion at stake” by canceling Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, a decision it claimed at the time was for “purely financial reasons.” Stewart took some time in his monologue that week to remind Paramount that it is series like The Late Show and The Daily Show—aka “the shows that you now seek to cancel, censor and control—that contributed a “not insignificant portion of that $8 billion value” in the first place. “If you believe as corporations or as networks, you can make yourselves so innocuous that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar, why would anyone watch you and you are fucking wrong,” he added.
That may not stop Paramount from trying to oust one of its most outspoken critics regardless, but as Stewart told Remnick, “You don’t compromise on what you do, and you do it until they tell you to leave.” He also took some time to reinforce that while late night hosts like himself, Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel (whose show was recently suspended by ABC following his comments on the Republican response to Charlie Kirk’s death) face heightened scrutiny from the current administration, they’re not the people suffering most. “We are a visible manifestation of certain things, but the victims are the people that are struggling to have any voice and are being forcibly removed from streets by hooded agents,” Stewart said. “Those are the victims of this administration.”
