In a conversation with karaswisher, jorgeramosnews discussed disinformation in the 2020 campaign, Latino Trump voters feeling 'vindicated,' and more
Photo: Patrick Farrell/Knight Media Foundation via Flickr In 2015, Univision’s Jorge Ramos was already known — as any profile of the anchor will tell you — as “the Walter Cronkite of Latin America.” But it was a confrontation with Donald Trump in Dubuque, Iowa that catapulted Ramos to prominence even among people who don’t watch Univision. “I stood up and I said, ‘I have a question. I have a question about immigration.
Subscribe on: Apple Podcast Google Podcast Spotify Kara Swisher: Hi everybody. How’s it going? So we want to do a lot of questions, because I assume you all have a lot of questions. So I’m going to start, we’re going to have a conversation.Yes, I will. I will ask the first question. But just so you know, two things, I left my phone in the car on the way here this morning. I came in from D.C., and I haven’t been without a cell phone since 1996 or so. So I’m a little bit jumpy.
So I was looking for the right moment to confront Donald Trump, just to tell him, “What you said about Mexican immigrants was racist, it was wrong. And as a journalist, I have the right to ask you a question.” How many of you have gone to Dubuque, Iowa?Just a few. Well, so we found that he was going to give a press conference in Dubuque, Iowa, not in New York because it would have been with thousands of journalists.
How has that affected your job? I want to get beyond Trump because it’s been copied by a lot of people and a lot of people are using social media to bypass reporters and journalists and to tell their stories on their own, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. How does it affect your job? Because you had a point of view early on. Everyone’s like, “He shouldn’t have a point of view.” I heard that from some people.
And on certain occasions, you have to have a point of view. Once I had the opportunity, I wouldn’t say it was an interview with Fidel Castro. He was in Guadalajara, he was going from one room to another in a hotel, and I stopped and I asked him some questions and at the end his bodyguard pushed me aside, and I couldn’t continue the conversation.
It’s really interesting, because I’ve been recently watching a lot of Edward R. Murrow stuff. … and he was quite confrontational actually in a lot of ways, especially for the day. What, then, happens to the media environment? Because it becomes so fractured. There’s so many voices, and everybody does have a say, which is a good thing, but at the same time, the noise creates a dysfunction. It’s amped up, sort of.
If you’re careless, and the things you create cause havoc, you pay for it. And I think it’s the responsibility. It’s being legally liable for creating things either sloppily or with malintent or things like that. Okay. That’s an interesting proposition, but as a journalist, we cannot just wait, see, well let’s see if they regulate them or not. Our responsibility is completely different. I think our responsibility would be to find facts to confront those who are in power and that’s what we need to do.
So we say, in political conversation, how about if we know for a fact that a president or a candidate is lying, and that he’s buying ads and publicity, should we stop them? Should we — And I think this conversation is obviously is going to continue, but since I cannot do anything about it right now, my responsibility, I’m just going back to my role as a journalist —Yeah. If someone is lying, we have to say it. If someone is harming children, we have to say it. And if a president is lying, we have to say it.
Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about covering this election. How do you look forward to it? And I do want to talk a little bit about immigration and where you think we are on it, because that story, one of the problems of this new news environment we’re in is that it’s very twitchy, it’s very quick and people move on from the next thing. So this week we’re talking about this, then we’re talking about this, and oh yeah, impeachment.
I think we are giving voice to people who don’t have a voice. When was the last time that you saw on ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN or Fox News an undocumented immigrant? Very rarely, and we do that all the time. The fact is that we have 10 million people in this country who are not criminals or terrorists or rapists who are contributing to the economy, and we have to do something about it. So that’s the first approach.
So here you have 50,000 Central Americans waiting on the Mexican side, and also the new National Guard created by President López Obrador is helping Donald Trump by stopping Central Americans crossing their southern border. So Mexico, in reality, has become Trump’s wall, and the new National Guard in Mexico is becoming actually the new immigration police for Donald Trump.
So what other things are you looking at in the election on the Democratic side? It’s been quite unusual. I told her when she dies, I’m going to have her brain looked at for FTE, so Fox Trauma. But anyway, she called me and she goes, “I really like what Bernie is saying,” and I’m like, “What?” Because she was sort of Trumpy, but she doesn’t like Trump because she thinks he’s gross, and then at the same time, she likes the tax cut, things like that, and so I don’t know. That’s my answer.I know California is not voting for Donald Trump, but otherwise, I don’t know what to say.
Not in a network. Not in a TV network because our job is disappearing. I remember when I started my career, I was 28. I was an anchor. It was not because I was the best or the worst. I was the only one in the network. And so they put me for a month and then it was two months, three months, and it’s been 33 years. But everybody wanted to be an anchor. I remember, everybody wanted to be Peter Jennings.Exactly. Well, that’s wrong because nowadays you have to be everything but an anchor.
And I’m reading right now the Ron Chernow book about Hamilton. I’ve been reading it for four years now. I am. I literally pick it up, I read four pages, I put it down, and I’m like, “I’m only on page 604.” But on page 604 it’s all about his use of media and media at the time. Under assumed names, he wrote under all these unusual names to go back and forth, and it was a really ugly time, politically. It was an ugly time from a media point of view. I was reading about Calendar, James Calendar.
Jorge Ramos: And, so yeah, I would say pay attention to what we have to say. Pay attention to those who don’t have a voice. Because when you talk about the Latino communities, just those who can talk on MSNBC and CNN, but the fact is that there are many voices that are out there and that we are simply not listened to. And the future is there. Cesar Chavez used to say in 1984 in San Francisco, he once said, “We’ve looked into the future and the future is ours.” It’s just the numbers.
Jorge Ramos: This is what happened. When I was in that press conference and when I got ejected by a bodyguard taller than me, well everyone’s taller than me, only two reporters, Kasie Hunt from MSNBC and Tom Llamas, they stood up and they told Donald Trump, “You cannot do that.” And thanks to them, I was able to go back to the press conference and then ask my questions. Nobody knows that I came back and I had seven minutes with Donald Trump back and forth.
Jorge Ramos: And I have a rule, usually with people with a lot of power. I have two things in mind. The first is that if I don’t ask the question, nobody else is going to do it. Obviously, that’s not true. But that’s the attitude that I have. And the second one is that I’m always assuming that I will never talk to that person again. And if you think of that, then it’s going to be a completely different interview.
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