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Jorge Ramos’ career is broad and successful. He has been at the helm of Univision’s newscast for more than 35 years, a communication monster within the Hispanic community. He has interviewed heads of state, covered wars, and has even received several awards for his journalistic work. However, for numerous years now, the Mexican journalist’s work has been more relevant for its ideological bias than for its quality.
A clear example of how Ramos’ work has lost journalistic equanimity is his last interview with Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE organization, to whom he asked a question that generated controversy.
“Are you concerned that, among conservatives, among whom of course there are many Latinos, there may be a double bias? First, to say that vaccines don’t work and, second, to believe ‘the Big Lie’: that Donald Trump won the last presidential election and not Joe Biden. Are these two trends, these two big lies, endangering democracy in this country?”
Jorge Ramos’ question, equating vaccine skeptics with those who believed former President Trump’s election allegations, is bold and over the top. This is especially true when he suggests that this skepticism puts the American democratic system at risk.
Apropos of this question by Ramos, Jorge Bonilla—director MRC Latino, arm of Media Research Center, an organization that analyzes American liberal media content—wrote an article criticizing the Mexican anchor’s question.
“There is a lot of dangerous misinformation to unpack here. First, vaccine skepticism is not the exclusive preserve of conservatives,” Bonilla wrote. “Univision viewers may not be aware of it because the network has hidden from memory the role of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in sowing early distrust of vaccines. As much as Ramos would like to attribute vaccine skepticism solely to conservatives, this is simply not true.”
The MRC Latino director called it “troubling” that the Mexican host would equate vaccine-related “skepticism” with the “big lie,” as this can lead to governmental outrages against American citizens.
“Does Ramos think Congress should convene a special commission to investigate vaccine skeptics or dissenters of the mandate?” asked Bonilla in his article. “Does the Department of Justice need to create an anti-terrorism division dedicated to investigating parents who oppose schoolchildren’s facemask mandates? Its ‘Big Lie’ language, at the very least, would suggest so.”
Jorge Ramos’ claim that there are many conservatives saying that “vaccines don’t work” also seems exaggerated, especially when both Republicans and Democrats have invited citizens to get vaccinated (a large percentage of Americans have at least one dose).
In the conservative world, in fact, the main criticisms are against mandatory vaccination, the health passport or other measures such as vaccinating children. Hispanic media, such as Univision and Telemundo, have twisted the facts to call those who oppose government mandates “anti-vaccine.”
Jorge Ramos went from journalist to political activist
The reality is that these takes by Jorge Ramos, with a clear political or ideological bent, are becoming more and more routine and he himself admitted it in 2017, during an interview with Cadena Ser, from Spain. “You can no longer be neutral,” Ramos said back then when asked about former President Trump, with whom he had a strong clash during a press conference in 2015.
Of course, Ramos has every right to politically oppose conservatives, the Republican Party and any politician he pleases. In fact, the anchor, as one of Univision’s leading pictures, is fully following the editorial line of the media outlet where he works, a news organization constantly accused of having a marked liberal-progressive bias when presenting reports.
The problem is that Jorge Ramos, from his own war waged against Trump, became among Latinos a simple spokesman for the Democrats and their liberal media.
He supported the protests of the summer of 2020 (and did not condemn the violence, riots and looting), ran a campaign against Trump himself for 5 years—in the same style as the national media—now promotes the use of the offensive and unpopular term “Latinx” and has barely made a couple of underhanded criticisms of the Biden administration on immigration issues in a year that has been terrible for the United States.
In spite of everything, Jorge Ramos continues to be a communicational reference among Hispanics, but a large part of the community detected the double standard of the Mexican, who has lost the recognition and respect he had earned in more than three decades of his career. Today Ramos, once the most influential Latino journalist in the United States, is nothing more than a liberal activist. This is sad because his best moment has passed and his journalistic legacy has been ruined by his own doing.
Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón is a journalist at El American specializing in the areas of American politics and media analysis // Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón es periodista de El American especializado en las áreas de política americana y análisis de medios de comunicación.
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