Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead told SiriusXM host and MSNBC author Dean Obeidallah that hiring Hasan Minhaj as host could “taint” her creation’s brand.

Minhaj has been taking fire for his admission that stories he tells onstage are “seventy percent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty percent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction” after The New Yorker’s Clare Malone confronted him about not being able to confirm things he’s said in his act. Minhaj also has his defenders.

On Friday’s edition of The Dean Obeidallah Show, Obeidallah asked Winstead if the issue would affect Hasan being hired to host The Daily Show:

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: This is someone, you’re not with The Daily Show now, but as someone who co-created, would that impact having Hasan as the new host of it?

LIZZ WINSTEAD: I mean, he’s reporting on the news. So I think that if he’s a good comic, that can be, that can be directed by an executive producer and a research team. And he’s bringing the truth.

I mean, I sure. I think that like you are, you sit in that chair as a character. I think that it would maybe taint the show because there’s somebody there who has taken a lot of liberties with their own truth.

You know, what do people again, what do viewers value about The Daily Show? Because The Daily Show is not a Weekend update. Let’s be clear. It has presented itself as something different. It always was something different.

And so if what– if the franchise is not just being funny, but also speaking truth to power and like exposing stuff and hypocrisy and and being satirical, the brand has to ask itself what does its audience want out of the host? Do they want that same, those same values out of the host?

Watch above via SiriusXM’s The Dean Obeidallah Show.

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