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Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists
The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens).
Aug 27, 2015
The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, "Trump's roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent." It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that's to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump's advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing.
Jorge Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Tuesday at a Trump press conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to "sit down," then told him: "Go back to Univision." When Ramos refused to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: "This is personal. ... He's talking about our parents, our friends, our kids and our babies."
One might think that in a conflict between a journalist removed from a press conference for asking questions and the politician who had him removed, journalists would side with their fellow journalist. Some are. But many American journalists have seized on the incident to denounce Ramos for the crime of having opinions and even suggesting that he's not really acting as a journalist at all.
Politico's political reporter Marc Caputo unleashed a Twitter rant this morning against Ramos. "This is bias: taking the news personally, explicitly advocating an agenda," he began. Then: "Trump can and should be pressed on this. Reporters can do this without being activists" and "some reporters still try to approach their stories fairly & decently. & doing so does not prevent good reporting." Not only did Ramos not do journalism, Caputo argued, but he actually ruins journalism: "My issue is his reporting is imbued with take-it-personally bias. . . . we fend off phony bias allegations & Ramos only helps to wrongly justify them. . . .One can ask and report without the bias. I've done it for years & will continue 2 do so."
A Washington Post article about the incident actually equated the two figures, beginning with the headline: "Jorge Ramos is a conflict junkie, just like his latest target: Donald Trump." The article twice suggested that Ramos' behavior was something other than journalism, claiming that his advocacy of immigration reform "blurred the line between journalist and activist" and that "by owning the issue of immigration, Ramos has also blurred the line between journalist and activist." That Ramos was acting more as an "activist" than a "journalist" was a commonly expressed criticism among media elites this morning.
Here we find, yet again, the enforcement of unwritten, very recent, distinctively corporatized rules of supposed "neutrality" and faux objectivity which all Real Journalists must obey, upon pain of being expelled from the profession. A Good Journalist must pretend they have no opinions, feign utter indifference to the outcome of political debates, never take any sides, be utterly devoid of any human connection to or passion for the issues they cover, and most of all, have no role to play whatsoever in opposing even the most extreme injustices.
Read the full article at The Intercept.
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© 2023 The Intercept
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, constitutional lawyer, commentator, author of three New York Times best-selling books on politics and law, and a former staff writer and editor at First Look media. His fifth and latest book is, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State," about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Glenn's column was featured at Guardian US and Salon. His previous books include: "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful," "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics," and "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, a George Polk Award, and was on The Guardian team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public interest journalism in 2014.
The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, "Trump's roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent." It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that's to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump's advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing.
Jorge Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Tuesday at a Trump press conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to "sit down," then told him: "Go back to Univision." When Ramos refused to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: "This is personal. ... He's talking about our parents, our friends, our kids and our babies."
One might think that in a conflict between a journalist removed from a press conference for asking questions and the politician who had him removed, journalists would side with their fellow journalist. Some are. But many American journalists have seized on the incident to denounce Ramos for the crime of having opinions and even suggesting that he's not really acting as a journalist at all.
Politico's political reporter Marc Caputo unleashed a Twitter rant this morning against Ramos. "This is bias: taking the news personally, explicitly advocating an agenda," he began. Then: "Trump can and should be pressed on this. Reporters can do this without being activists" and "some reporters still try to approach their stories fairly & decently. & doing so does not prevent good reporting." Not only did Ramos not do journalism, Caputo argued, but he actually ruins journalism: "My issue is his reporting is imbued with take-it-personally bias. . . . we fend off phony bias allegations & Ramos only helps to wrongly justify them. . . .One can ask and report without the bias. I've done it for years & will continue 2 do so."
A Washington Post article about the incident actually equated the two figures, beginning with the headline: "Jorge Ramos is a conflict junkie, just like his latest target: Donald Trump." The article twice suggested that Ramos' behavior was something other than journalism, claiming that his advocacy of immigration reform "blurred the line between journalist and activist" and that "by owning the issue of immigration, Ramos has also blurred the line between journalist and activist." That Ramos was acting more as an "activist" than a "journalist" was a commonly expressed criticism among media elites this morning.
Here we find, yet again, the enforcement of unwritten, very recent, distinctively corporatized rules of supposed "neutrality" and faux objectivity which all Real Journalists must obey, upon pain of being expelled from the profession. A Good Journalist must pretend they have no opinions, feign utter indifference to the outcome of political debates, never take any sides, be utterly devoid of any human connection to or passion for the issues they cover, and most of all, have no role to play whatsoever in opposing even the most extreme injustices.
Read the full article at The Intercept.
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, constitutional lawyer, commentator, author of three New York Times best-selling books on politics and law, and a former staff writer and editor at First Look media. His fifth and latest book is, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State," about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Glenn's column was featured at Guardian US and Salon. His previous books include: "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful," "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics," and "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, a George Polk Award, and was on The Guardian team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public interest journalism in 2014.
The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, "Trump's roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent." It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that's to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump's advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing.
Jorge Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Tuesday at a Trump press conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to "sit down," then told him: "Go back to Univision." When Ramos refused to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: "This is personal. ... He's talking about our parents, our friends, our kids and our babies."
One might think that in a conflict between a journalist removed from a press conference for asking questions and the politician who had him removed, journalists would side with their fellow journalist. Some are. But many American journalists have seized on the incident to denounce Ramos for the crime of having opinions and even suggesting that he's not really acting as a journalist at all.
Politico's political reporter Marc Caputo unleashed a Twitter rant this morning against Ramos. "This is bias: taking the news personally, explicitly advocating an agenda," he began. Then: "Trump can and should be pressed on this. Reporters can do this without being activists" and "some reporters still try to approach their stories fairly & decently. & doing so does not prevent good reporting." Not only did Ramos not do journalism, Caputo argued, but he actually ruins journalism: "My issue is his reporting is imbued with take-it-personally bias. . . . we fend off phony bias allegations & Ramos only helps to wrongly justify them. . . .One can ask and report without the bias. I've done it for years & will continue 2 do so."
A Washington Post article about the incident actually equated the two figures, beginning with the headline: "Jorge Ramos is a conflict junkie, just like his latest target: Donald Trump." The article twice suggested that Ramos' behavior was something other than journalism, claiming that his advocacy of immigration reform "blurred the line between journalist and activist" and that "by owning the issue of immigration, Ramos has also blurred the line between journalist and activist." That Ramos was acting more as an "activist" than a "journalist" was a commonly expressed criticism among media elites this morning.
Here we find, yet again, the enforcement of unwritten, very recent, distinctively corporatized rules of supposed "neutrality" and faux objectivity which all Real Journalists must obey, upon pain of being expelled from the profession. A Good Journalist must pretend they have no opinions, feign utter indifference to the outcome of political debates, never take any sides, be utterly devoid of any human connection to or passion for the issues they cover, and most of all, have no role to play whatsoever in opposing even the most extreme injustices.
Read the full article at The Intercept.
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