Jorge Ramos is not boring. And he doesn’t hide his biases. CNN conceals its blatant liberal biases. And the network often mistakes its bi-ignorance for objectivity.
On Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN, Ramos, the Univision and Fusion anchor whom Matt Drudge has praised for grilling politicians–especially those on the left–in a way the mainstream media refuses to do, suggested CNN and other mainstream media networks stop trying to fool the American public by hiding their liberal biases. According to Gallup, a near-majority and a strong plurality of Americans have consistently said the media are too liberal. This year, 44% of Americans believe the media are too liberal and trust in the media is at a record low.
Ramos said he puts his biases out front and is “not hiding anything.” He called out host Brian Stelter for insinuating that “objective” reporters like those on his network do not have biases.
“And of course we have points of view. Brian, you have a point of view, and you have prejudices, and I have points of view and I have prejudices,” Ramos said. “But the difference is that, nowadays, is that people are very smart. I mean, they do know that we’re not talking in a vacuum. They do know that we have political points of view.”
Ramos told Stelter that “it doesn’t make any sense to try to hide that from the public.”
Stelter then noted that “there’s a lot of anchors and a lot of reporters who would say they leave their opinions out of it completely and they just report what people tell them.” Except too often, especially on CNN, that is not the case.
Ramos said that as an immigrant from Mexico, he has a point of view on issues (Ramos has pushed for comprehensive amnesty legislation.), but he said that “that doesn’t mean that, when I’m reporting about Syria or Iraq or what’s going on at the border, that I can’t say exactly what is going on.”
“So, in other words, what I’m trying to do as a journalist every single day is to be fair,” Ramos said. “And also, Brian, I think it’s important that being fair doesn’t mean that you have to be bland and that you have to be boring. I mean, being fair means many times confronting the precedent and going to the Congress and confronting John Boehner.”
As the network’s critics have noted, CNN’s problem is not the network’s strong liberal bias. The network is turning off Americans and seeing its ratings plummet because it tries to fool an American public, which is able to get more information than ever before, to think its anchors are “objective”–when they are not–with both feet planted squarely on the proverbial 50-yard line. That’s a recipe for failure.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.