At Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s 7 a.m. press conferences, the Mañaneras, Jorge Ramos would cite official numbers and tell the Mexican president that the number of people dying in Mexico was “incredible,” and López Obrador always gave him the same answer. “Bueno, yo tengo otros datos,” the president would say, which Ramos translates as “I have other facts.”

“That’s what we cannot allow as journalists,” Ramos told mitú in an exclusive interview. “There’s only one set of facts.”

Ramos, now 68, anchored the evening news at Univision for 38 years before becoming an independent journalist two years ago, and earlier this year, as we reported, his digital show “Así Veo Las Cosas” won the News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding News Program in Spanish. When we asked him why journalism matters so much right now, Ramos answered, “Simply just to tell the truth.”

Ramos pointed to a universe with so much misinformation and disinformation that it is incredibly difficult to know whether a video shows a real person or something created on a computer. “I think journalism is more important than ever in this era when politicians tell you one thing, and it is difficult just to verify that information. Here comes journalism,” he said, adding that “nowadays it is incredibly important that we all, whether you’re a journalist or not, that we all become a little bit of a reporter.”

His own team followed that discipline while covering the recent earthquakes in Venezuela and Colombia, relying on reports from real people on their cellphones while making sure the videos circulating on social media weren’t from other earthquakes that had “absolutely nothing to do with Venezuela and Colombia.”

Journalism’s Responsibilities According to Jorge Ramos

“As journalists, we have two main responsibilities,” Ramos said. “One is you have to report reality as it is, not as you wish it would be. That gives you credibility. So if I say something is red, then reality has to prove that it’s red.” And when he gets something wrong, “I can come back and say, ‘I’m sorry, I made a mistake,’ and then you move on.” “It doesn’t matter if you have a leftist approach or an approach from the right, or you’re neutral,” he said. “The fact is that facts are facts.”

The second responsibility, according to Ramos, is “to question and challenge those who are in power,” and he carried it into his interviews with Hugo Chávez, whom he sat down with in December 1998, as well as Nicolás Maduro, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. “I truly believe that if you don’t challenge those who are in power, if you don’t challenge the powerful, you’re not doing your job as a journalist,” he said.

He approaches those conversations the way the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci did, who, according to Ramos, “thought that an interview is a war.” “I don’t mean this has to be a war,” he said, “but some interviews are war, and sometimes the interviewer wins, and sometimes the interviewee wins.” “I approach it thinking that I will never talk to that person again, so I’m not looking for access, and I’m not trying to quedar bien para que me vuelva a aceptar.”

“We have a beautiful word in Spanish. It’s called contrapoder. Contra is against, and poder is power,” Ramos said. “If we position ourselves on the other side of power, if we position ourselves as contrapoder as journalists, you’re always gonna be in the right place.”

Censorship Sent Jorge Ramos North at 24

When Ramos left Mexico at 24, the country “was not a democracy,” he said, but “a party dictatorship” under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held the presidency for 71 years, with censorship flowing directly from Los Pinos, the presidential residence, to the mass media.

He worked his way up from helping other journalists at a radio station to writing for television, and became a reporter at a very young age. His third report was about el dedazo, the practice by which the sitting president chose his successor with the point of a finger, and his editor and the director of the news program told him it “cannot be said on Mexican television.” When he rewrote it, they didn’t like it either and wanted him to read someone else’s copy, which he refused to do, so at 24 he quit. “Nobody knew who I was. Nobody cared who I was,” he said. He remembers going home and telling his mother, “Mamá, quemé las naves y no sé qué voy a hacer.“

“I just didn’t wanna be another censored journalist in Mexico,” Ramos said.

By his count, waiting for Mexico to go from a dictatorship to a democracy would have taken 17 years, time he just didn’t have, so he sold his red Volkswagen bochito for about $2,000, applied to an extension program at UCLA, and left for Los Angeles within weeks. On a small black-and-white television he bought for around $80, he watched reporters question President Ronald Reagan. “Nothing happened to them. They would go to their homes, no censorship,” he said. “This is the country where I want to live.”

More than four decades later, on September 18, President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, saying on Truth Social that the ban was “a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” After the three outlets sued, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the administration to restore their access for 14 days, writing that Trump’s directive was most likely unconstitutional and rejecting the White House’s argument that the ban was driven by national security concerns. Even then, reporters from the three outlets were turned away on the morning of September 24 before being allowed back onto the White House grounds that afternoon.

Ramos knows that pressure from the inside. In 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump had him removed from a press conference in Iowa, which Ramos considers “also censorship here in the United States.” “I left Mexico because I didn’t want to be a censored journalist, and I continue to believe exactly the same,” he said. As an independent journalist, he sees part of his role as making sure “that I can speak up” and “that silence won’t be the rule, wherever I am working as a journalist.”

From “Dinosaur” to “Proudly a YouTuber”

“For the first time in history, and this is beautiful, for the first time in history we have the tools with Google and YouTube to do whatever you want as an independent journalist,” Ramos said, adding that this “has changed the industry completely.”

When he started out in the United States, reporters had to pay their dues, moving from local reporter to perhaps local anchor, national reporter and morning show anchor before, maybe at 40 or 50, becoming an anchor. If students asked him whether they should become anchors, he said his answer would be, “Please don’t be an anchor. Be a surfer. Create content,” because the idea of being “anchored to one place and seeing the world around you doesn’t work anymore.”

“People follow people. People are not following institutions anymore,” he said. “I grew up at a time when we were supposed to respect and follow institutions. Not anymore.” A few years ago, when he still anchored on television, Ramos used to tell students, “Look at me because I am a dinosaur,” since he expected people to make an appointment with him every night at 6:30 p.m. “I was about to be extinct, and then I was about to disappear, and then suddenly I was reinvented,” he said. “Now I am a YouTuber, proudly a YouTuber, and I am a TikToker, and I’m a podcaster.” According to Ramos, “the new generation is teaching us, the old generation,” how to use the internet, YouTube and Google to find information and report on it.

Content Creators, Deepfakes and the “Meteorologists of the Truth”

Asked whether opening these channels to everyone also risks spreading more misinformation, Ramos answered, “It is possible,” and pointed to a United Nations report that found more than 60% of content creators and influencers worldwide don’t fact-check their information before distributing it. He was most likely referring to a 2024 UNESCO survey, which found that 62% of digital content creators do not rigorously and systematically check their facts before sharing. Search his name online, Ramos said, and you’ll find “hundreds of spots and videos in which I may appear asking for your bank account number and telling you how to cure diabetes.” “It might look like me, but it’s not me,” he said, warning that “it is dangerous to follow AI without checking the real source.”

In Miami, where he lives, Ramos relies on two meteorologists during hurricane season: Albert Martínez of Canal Meteo and John Morales, formerly of Miami’s NBC station, to tell him whether to leave his house with his family and his dog. “I trust them because my life and my house and my family depend on what they tell me,” he said. “We’re looking for meteorologists of the truth.” Becoming that kind of trusted source, according to Ramos, is “something that you have to work on every single day,” because “that credibility can disappear so easily once you start making up news.” “If you’re more concerned about clicks and likes and subscribers than on telling the truth, that’s where the problem lies,” he said.

“You Have to Be a Witness”

“Of course you can analyze what’s happening in the world, but you have to be there; you have to be a witness,” Ramos said. When his bosses didn’t want to send him to the war in Afghanistan because it was too dangerous, he asked for vacation and, in his words, “went on vacation to Afghanistan.” “It was so stupid,” he said. He flew to Pakistan, crossed on foot into a country at war, and hired four rebels to take him to Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Along the way, one of them, a 17- or 18-year-old, pointed his rifle at Ramos’ face and said, “I’m a follower of Osama.” Ramos was sure the young man would kill him. A CNN producer told him to leave his credit cards behind and bring $1 bills instead, so he carried 10 or 15 and showed the teenager the money. When they reached the hotel two hours later, the young man pushed him aside with his rifle, and Ramos handed him $15. “That saved my life,” he said.

“I think as a reporter, you have to be where the news is,” Ramos said, adding in Spanish, “La paternidad y el periodismo son muy parecidos. La mitad tiene que ver con estar presente.” One of five children in a family that didn’t have enough money to travel, he found in journalism a way to reach “the most fantastic places in the world, including seven wars,” and to meet some of the most interesting people in the world. “Gabriel García Márquez was right that ‘Esta es la profesión más bonita del mundo,'” he said. “I don’t think any other profession can give you that.”

Where Jorge Ramos Sees Latino Media Going

Asked where Latino media is headed, Ramos said it is moving “from big companies to smaller outlets, to individual enterprises.” He realized this while he was still working in television. “The audiences were disappearing, and we knew exactly where they were going. They’re going to our digital devices,” he said. He believes television will survive, especially for breaking news and sports events, but “if we want to survive, you have to jump. You have to jump and try new things.”

For young Latino journalists who want to follow his path, Ramos said, “Just get a phone, get a YouTube account, start reporting. You don’t have to wait. You can be a witness, maybe not the most experienced witness. But you can be in Venezuela right now, or in Colombia, or in Nepal, or in Mexico, and right now you can do great reporting just with a YouTube account and with a cellphone.”

When we asked whether written journalism will survive, Ramos answered, “Oh, yes. I think so.”

“Just think of words like rebelión or libertad or contrapoder, and then you suddenly find something behind them that is so powerful,” he said. “That can change a country. I’m not worried about how we deal with words and ideas.” Ramos calls artificial intelligence “risky and dangerous,” but he said “it would be silly to try to stop that revolution because it’s already happening,” and that journalists “have to adapt to the new tools and techniques.”

Presidents will keep claiming to have other facts, and the platforms will keep changing, but the job Ramos defended as a 24-year-old in a Mexican newsroom stays the same. “The basic is, again, report reality as it is, and challenge the powerful,” he said. “If you do both things as journalists, regardless of whether it’s on a television network, a newspaper, in a book, on a cellphone, on YouTube, it doesn’t matter.”

Tags: Jorge Ramos