Journalist Jorge Ramos says that in the United States, where he lives, he has two trusted meteorologists whom he goes to every hurricane season to ask whether or not he should evacuate his home in Florida. And trust them completely. The story is relevant because the Mexican reporter presented his most recent book this Friday, That’s how I see things (Planeta), at the Guadalajara Fair (FIL) with a precise idea: in times of fake news, deception by politicians and contempt for the truth, journalists must maintain their credibility, be that kind of meteorologists to whom the public Come to obtain valuable information that allows you to navigate a world of excessive information and manipulation.
Ramos (Mexico City, 66 years old) will say goodbye next Friday to his millions of viewers of the Univision news program, a daily event that has lasted 38 years and that has allowed him to tell the most important events in the United States, Latin America and some wars. that have bled the planet dry. The reporter is a witness to history and from his perspective and above all his questions he has forged a career that places him among the most prestigious voices in journalism in Spanish.
He has defined himself as “a dinosaur” in the talk he held this Friday at the FIL together with Javier Lafuente, deputy director of EL PAÍS in America, and in front of a packed auditorium. Dinosaur because it comes from another era of journalism, one in which perhaps reporters were more respected, influenced public discussion, when the presentation of data, the verification of information, the cultivation of credible sources and the search for the truth They were the foundations on which credibility was built.
Ramos has said that his great journalistic references are the Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci, the stubborn uncomfortable questioner who provoked tantrums from more than one powerful person, and the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, who with her tape recorder and her notes “was able to recover the truth, and not other data”, of what happened that tragic night in October 1968, a wound that continues to fester in Mexico. What a coincidence that Fallaci and Poniatowska coincided to report on that massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City.
Now, however, the world faces a more complex reality: social networks, controlled in many cases by self-centered billionaires like Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), who can spend $260 million supporting the presidential race of characters of dubious democratic vein such as Donald Trump, or directed by influencers who endlessly repeat unverified information; which are spaces where hoaxes are spread, intolerance, hatred and lies rule that end up forging the opinions of people who then go to the polls to choose, often with inflamed prejudices.
It was at that point that Lafuente put his finger on it to point out that Musk and fake news now represent a great danger not only for the survival of journalism, but for democracies. “It has always been complicated to be a journalist,” Jorge Ramos responded and added that reporters and the media do not gain anything by leaving platforms like X, where, despite so many lies, a discussion that can be valuable is still held. “We cannot forget that this world exists, what is up to us is to do good journalistic work and for people to go look for those two meteorologists they can trust,” he said.
A very young journalism student has asked Ramos how he can find his own voice. What a question at a time when journalists are questioning how to survive. The veteran reporter has responded that the basis of all good journalism is knowing how to ask questions at the right time. Ask uncomfortable questions. He recounted, for example, that occasion when the Government of Nicolás Maduro surprisingly agreed to let him interview the Venezuelan president. They gave him and his team visas and they traveled to Caracas. In Miraflores, an apparently charismatic Maduro asked him, while the cameramen were setting up their equipment, how Ramos’s wife, who is Venezuelan, was doing. In the reporter’s head, however, there was the first question he should ask, because he knew that this first question would set the tone for the talk. And the Venezuelan did not like the question at all. What would he be named, because many people call him a dictator? There were 17 minutes of tense interview that ended with the confiscation of the television station’s equipment (valued at around $200,000), Ramos and his team detained for two hours at the Miraflores Palace and more at their hotel, while the interview was destroyed. . A recording, however, was rescued from the archives of the Venezuelan Presidency, which had recorded the conversation, and reached Ramos from someone in the Government. The importance of credibility.
The writer also assures that although he will leave the Univisión Newscast, he does not say goodbye to his loyal audience. Journalism is his vocation and he will continue to exercise it in the brave and confrontational way that characterizes him, raising the hair of the powerful, as happened with a discomposed Donald Trump who kicked him out of a press conference or with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former president of Mexico, irritated by the data on violence that Ramos presented to him in one of his conferences called The morning. The reporter will continue practicing after 40 years of career, because tumultuous times are coming, with the world bleeding in two terrible wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, with Latin America suffering oppressive governments and with Trump back in power. “Trump is a very lying bully. He will develop a one-man government and do whatever he wants. That is very dangerous for Mexico and the world,” he stated.
Ramos has spoken precisely about Mexico and violence. He fears that this bleeding will continue and has asked the current president Claudia Sheinbaum to intervene so that his six-year term does not end with the tens of thousands of deaths that the previous one left behind. Eighty people are murdered a day, Ramos said, a bad prognosis. The journalist has seemed to give some benefit of the doubt to the president, whom he has called a great communicator, but fears the accumulation of power in a single party and under a single person. He does not want another PRI in Mexico, he has stated. He still has an interview pending with the president, who has not wanted to speak with him, because the reporter never tires of asking. He knows that he is privileged, because he lives in a safe country, where journalists are not massacred like in Mexico, and because his voice is respected and opens the doors to the corridors of power. That has been his personal battle: Jorge Ramos’ tireless fight for credibility.