Media Research Center president Brent Bozell called on Univision to remove Jorge Ramos from his position after the Latino anchor called on fellow journalists to end their impartial coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in an op-ed published in Time Magazine and an appearance Thursday night on Fox News’s Kelly File.
“By deciding to openly take sides and urging all journalists to be as unethical as he is in his coverage of this year’s U.S. presidential election, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos has rendered himself incapable of serving as a credible, impartial news anchor for Univision’s millions of viewers,” Bozell said in a statement.
“At the very least, Univision should remove Ramos from the network’s national evening news anchor chair, from now through Election Day. If Jorge Ramos has any sense left of professional integrity, he should tender his resignation and pursue his new passion, as an anti-Trump, pro-Clinton political activist,” the MRC head added.
“It doesn’t matter who you are—a journalist, a politician or a voter—we’ll all be judged by how we responded to Donald Trump. Like it or not, this election is a plebiscite on the most divisive, polarizing and disrupting figure in American politics in decades. And neutrality is not an option,” Ramos wrote in an op-ed published in Time Magazine on Tuesday.
He doubled-down on his highly partisan anti-Trump position with Megyn Kelly on her Fox News program Thursday night:
Kelly: Now he’s [Jorge Ramos] getting attention for calling on his fellow journalists to drop their impartiality when it comes to candidate Trump, writing, “It doesn’t matter who you are—a journalist, a politician, or a voter, we’ll all be judged by how we responded to Donald Trump. What do you mean by that? Because you come out specifically and say neutrality is not an option, even for journalists. Explain.
Ramos: I think neutrality’s not an option when you watch as a journalist are confronted with racism, discrimination, corruption, public lies, dictatorship, or violations of human rights. I think Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite got it right. There are certain instances in which you have to take a stand.
Ramos said that Kelly herself had taken a stand when she asked Trump about remarks he had made about women at a fall debate of GOP candidates hosted by Fox News.
But Kelly disagreed with that assessment.
“That was me asking a question. I identified an issue, and thought it worthy of a question. It wasn’t ‘Here’s what Megyn Kelly thinks of you,’ ” she said.
On his partisan stand against Trump, Ramos told Kelly:
It is not exactly an opinion. I don’t know if Donald Trump is a racist. I don’t know what’s in his head, but I do know what’s coming out of his mouth.
And when he says that Mexican immigrants are criminals, rapists, and drug traffickers, that’s a racist remark.
When he says that a judge, simply because of his ethnic heritage, cannot be part of a case simply because of that, simply because he’s Latino, that’s a racist remark.
And I think we as journalists, we have to call it out.
Maybe Donald Trump doesn’t consider himself a racist but 73 percent of Latinos think that he is.
Newsbusters noted that “Kelly however called out Ramos a bit, asking if he discloses the fact that his daughter Paolo Ramos has ‘a working position,’ within the Hillary Clinton campaign whenever he covers an aspect of the election.” They went on:
“Is this personal for you, in that way?” she pressed.
“I’ve disclosed that many, many times… in other words, that’s [Paolo’s] decision, and I have absolutely nothing to do with that,” Ramos concluded.
Ramos notes that he had published a note on the Univision website identifying the younger Ramos’ connection to Clinton. “We maintain that, in part, through transparency with our audience, our colleagues and our critics,” he wrote in June on the matter.
In his Time Magazine op-ed, Ramos completely shed any pretense of objectivity in his reporting on Trump:
Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses, we will be asked on November 9th: What did you do? Did you support him? Were you brave enough, ethical enough, to challenge him when he insulted immigrants, Muslims, women, war heroes and people with disabilities? Are you on the record correcting his lies? Did you discuss with your friends and family that in a democracy like ours there is no room for racism and discrimination? Or did you just sit idly, silently, allowing others to decide the future of the United States?
Because you will be asked.
Trump has forced journalists to revisit rules of objectivity and fairness. Just providing both points of view is not enough in the current presidential campaign. If a candidate is making racist and sexist remarks, we cannot hide in the principle of neutrality. That’s a false equivalence.
Ken Oliver-Méndez, MRC’s Latino director, noted that Ramos has a history of using Time Magazine as a venue for his biased political opinions:
“Talking with Time magazine back in 2014, Jorge Ramos recognized that ‘with the political positions I have been taking lately, obviously I am running the risk of losing credibility.’ By deciding to openly take sides in this year’s U.S. presidential election, Jorge Ramos now needs to face the full consequences of losing whatever credibility he had left as a journalist,” Oliver-Méndez said in the MRC statement.
“He certainly no longer deserves to be seen by his viewers as an impartial, unaligned and credible source of news,” he added.
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