Jorge Ramos and the tireless fight for credibility

The Mexican-American journalist Jorge Ramos says that, in the United States — where he lives and works — he has two trusted meteorologists. Every hurricane season, he asks them whether he should evacuate from his house in Florida.

This story is relevant because the veteran Spanish-language news anchor, best known for his work in Univision, just presented his most recent book, Así veo las cosas (or, The Way I See Things), at the 2024 Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico. He affirms that, in a time of fake news, deceitful politicians and contempt for the truth, journalists must maintain their credibility, just like those meteorologists to whom the public turns to obtain valuable information. This helps people navigate in a world filled with manipulation and excessive information.

Ramos, who was born in Mexico City 66 years ago, will soon say goodbye to the millions of viewers who watch his Univision newscast, a daily event that has lasted 38 years. The news program has allowed him to report on the most important events in the United States, Latin America and several wars that have bled the planet.

The reporter is a witness to history. From his perspective — and, above all, through the questions he asks — he has forged a career that places him among the most prestigious voices in Spanish-language journalism.

Ramos defined himself as “a dinosaur’ during the talk he gave on Friday, December 6, in Guadalajara. In front of a packed room, he spoke alongside Javier Lafuente, the deputy director of EL PAÍS in the Americas. He uses the “dinosaur” label because he comes from another era of journalism, one in which reporters were perhaps more respected, influenced the public debate, presented facts and fact-checked information. That was when the cultivation of reliable sources, as well as the search for truth, were the bases on which credibility was built.

Ramos has said that his great journalistic role models are the Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci — the stubborn and uncomfortable interrogator who caused more than one powerful person to throw tantrums — and the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska. With her tape recorder and her notes, she “was able to [discover] the truth” about what happened that tragic night in October of 1968… a wound that continues to fester in Mexico. What a coincidence that Fallaci and Poniatowska met to report on that massacre, which occurred in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City.

Nowadays, however, the world is facing a more complex reality: social media, controlled in many cases by self-centered billionaires like Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter). Someone like him can spend $260 million supporting the presidential race of characters with dubious democratic credentials like Donald Trump, while influencers can endlessly repeat unverified information. Hoaxes can spread in these spaces where intolerance, hatred and lies reign. Social media often ends up shaping the opinion of people who then turn out to vote, often with inflamed prejudices.

Lafuente pointed out that Musk and fake news now represent a great danger. And not only for the survival of journalism, but for democracies. “It’s always been difficult to be a journalist,” Jorge Ramos responded, adding that reporters and media outlets gained nothing by leaving platforms like X, where, despite so many lies, a valuable discussion is still taking place. “We cannot forget that this world exists. What we need is to do good journalistic work, to make people go looking for those two meteorologists they can trust,” he joked.

A very young journalism student asked Ramos how he could find his own voice. Quite the question at a time when journalists are wondering about how they’ll survive. The veteran reporter responded by saying that the basis of all good journalism is knowing how to ask the right question at the right time, even if the questions are uncomfortable.

He recounted, for example, the occasion when Nicolás Maduro’s government surprisingly agreed to let him interview the Venezuelan president. They gave Ramos and his team visas and they traveled to Caracas. In the presidential palace, an apparently charismatic Maduro asked him , while the cameramen were setting up their equipment, how Ramos’ wife (who is Venezuelan) was doing. The reporter’s mind, however, was thinking about the first question he should ask, because he knew that this first question would set the tone for the conversation. And the Venezuelan leader didn’t like the question at all: What would he label himself, since so many people said he was a dictator?

It was a tense 17-minute-long interview that ended with the confiscation of the television station’s equipment (valued at around $200,000). Ramos and his team were also detained for two hours in the Miraflores Palace and for another two hours in their hotel, while footage of the interview was destroyed. A recording, however, was rescued from the archives of the Office of the Presidency, which had recorded the conversation. It reached Ramos via someone in the government. Hence the importance of credibility.

Ramos assured everyone at his talk that, even though he is leaving the Univisión newscast, he’s not saying goodbye to his faithful audience. Journalism is his calling; he will continue to practice it in the brave and confrontational manner that characterizes him, making powerful people’s hair stand on end. This happened with a furious Donald Trump, who once threw Ramos out of a press conference, or with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former president of Mexico, who was irritated by the statistics on violence that Ramos presented to him during one of the statesman’s daily news conferences.

The reporter will continue to practice his profession after 40 years in journalism, because tumultuous times are coming. The world is bleeding to death in two terrible wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, while Latin America is suffering from oppressive governments. And Trump is back in power. “Trump is a [liar]. He will develop a one-man government and do whatever he wants. That is very dangerous for Mexico and for the world,” Ramos opined.

During his book talk, Ramos spoke specifically about Mexico and the violence that engulfs much of the country. He fears that this bloodbath will continue and has asked the current president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to intervene, so that her six-year term doesn’t end with the tens of thousands of deaths, which occurred during the administration that preceded hers. Around 80 people are murdered each day in Mexico, a bad prognosis, according to Ramos. However, the journalist has given some benefit of the doubt to the president, whom he described as an excellent communicator. Still, he fears the accumulation of power taking place via a single party and a single person. He has affirmed that doesn’t want another PRI in Mexico — the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed uninterruptedly from 1929 until 2000.

Ramos still has an interview pending with the incumbent president. She hasn’t agreed to sit down with him, yet he doesn’t tire of asking for an opportunity to speak with her. He knows that he’s privileged: he lives in a safe country, where journalists aren’t massacred as they are in Mexico. And his voice is respected. This has been his personal battle: Jorge Ramos’ tireless fight for credibility.

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