‘I’m Not Ready To Retire’

To Jorge Ramos, neutrality is a four-letter word.

After nearly four decades as a Univision anchor — a high-profile perch that eventually turned him into, according to The Guardian, the best-known journalist in the Spanish-speaking world — the 67-year-old Ramos left behind the television news industry that defined much of his career to launch an independent, internet-based news program. His new show, which debuted in June and can be found across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, is called Asi Veo las Cosas — Spanish for “That’s how I see things.”

In other words, it’s not the kind of show that clings to the familiar “voice from nowhere” objectivity that characterizes much of legacy journalism. Instead, Asi Veo las Cosas is largely an extension of Ramos’ world view — which he described in a phone interview with me as, basically, “pro-immigrant, pro-democracy, and pro-freedom.”

Why Jorge Ramos believes journalism should take a stand

“I personally have no problem with objectivity,” said Ramos, who was born in Mexico and moved to the U.S. in the 1980s to escape press censorship. “If something is red, we say it’s red. If 16 people died, we say 16. And if you make a mistake, you correct it and move on. But sometimes, and I understand this might be controversial in certain places, sometimes as a journalist you have to take a stand.

“I don’t think neutrality is a journalistic value.”

Of course, no one who’s followed his career up to this point needs him to spell that out. After all, he’s built a career out of amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and confronting politicians — from calling President Obama “deporter-in-chief” during a Univision interview in 2014 to his tense exchange with Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro in 2019 at the presidential palace in Caracas, during which he called the strongman “illegitimate.”

And now, he’s running a digital platform with a clear point of view, one that’s both a reinvention and a return to form — bringing him closer to the audiences he’s always fought for.

He spends time during his broadcasts, for example, responding directly to viewers. One recent episode found him speaking directly to the camera about a woman named Yocari Villagómez who’d lived in the U.S. for 12 years, with no criminal record. Despite being married to an American citizen, she was told she had to leave — and so made the difficult decision to self-deport to Mexico, with her husband by her side.

In recent days, he also traveled to Brooklyn to surprise a young student named Camila who wants to follow in Ramos’ professional footsteps.

“I knew that after television I needed to reinvent myself,” Ramos said. “At 67, I’m not ready to retire. I see the numbers — millions of people viewing what I’m doing online — and the immediate communication I have with the audience that I didn’t have before.”

Still, he admits the shift comes with challenges. “I’m still figuring out how to monetize a news operation like the one I’m in,” he added. But for Ramos, the motivation is about more than business. “I believe that journalists never retire. And I still have a battle to fight.”

At the center of that battle is the animating force — contrapoder, a Spanish word that literally means to be against power — that’s characterized his work for pretty much the entirety of his career.

“I think that as journalists, we have two main responsibilities: The first one is to report reality as it is, not as we wish it would be. And the second one, which is the most important social responsibility that we have, is to question and to challenge those who are in power. I think if we applied this to every situation – Democrats or Republicans, tyrants or not — and if you as a journalist always try to position yourself as contrapoder, in other words on the other side of power, you will be fine.”

This philosophy also places Ramos squarely inside a broader debate about objectivity. For much of the 20th century, American journalism upheld what the Columbia Journalism Review recently described as a belief that “detached fact-finding” is the highest standard worth pursuing. But critics like NYU’s Jay Rosen argue that this approach has granted journalists “unearned authority” and discouraged them from owning perspectives for which there is no alternative viewpoint. Ramos agrees. For him, neutrality in the face of things like racism, human rights violations, or corruption is actually closer to complicity.

In fact, it was watching American journalists freely criticize President Ronald Reagan that convinced him to stay in his adopted country. “I love this country,” Ramos said of the U.S.. “This country gave me opportunities my country of origin couldn’t. But I’ve never seen so much fear out there as I see now. However, I think this too shall pass. The essence of the United States — freedom, diversity, opportunity — will prevail. But we have to fight for it. Like never before.”