Today, upon signing off of his eponymous weekly public affairs show, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos officially departed the broadcast airwaves. At least for now. And our political discourse, particularly within the Hispanic community, is vastly better off for it.
Watch Ramos’s closing monologue on Al Punto:
Jorge Ramos’s final monologue on Univision: his sign-off from “Al Punto” pic.twitter.com/5se80yh7a4
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) December 15, 2024
JORGE RAMOS: This program forces us to reflect on what has happened in the United States over the last 17 years. We went on the air before Barack Obama won the Democratic Party nomination and eventually The White House. It was a moment that some called post-racial due to the election of the first African-American president in the country’s history. Years later, we would see another significant change with the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, and then the second in 2024. Meanwhile, over all this time, Latino power has been growing. We are more than 60 million Hispanics in the United States. Today we have more congressmen, more senators and more representatives in all positions and we can say that no one can reach The White House without the Latino vote. But we still do not have the representation that corresponds to us. For example, Latinos make up almost 20% of the population in the United States and we should have 20 senators. On the other hand, today we only have 7 senators. We have a long way to go. Something I’ve all learned these years is that the voice of politicians is important, but so is your voice and ours. I believe that journalism is a public service and I hope that in all these years we have contributed to Latinos and immigrants living better and having greater opportunities. When we chose the name of the program, the idea was to always inform you with the truth, even if there was resistance or it bothered some. And I think we have fulfilled that. I work with an extraordinary team. I will thank you all my life. And you know what? We leave in peace. Thank you, on the other side of the screen, for believing in what we do. Thank you for supporting our journalism and thank you for having accompanied us to this end point. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
This was his final-final exit monologue that aired on Univision, the first being his Friday farewell from Noticiero Univision, the newscast he helmed for 38 years. Per Deadline:
Jorge Ramos has signed off his last broadcast as co-anchor of Noticiero Univision as the journalist marks the end of an era.
Ramos spent almost 40 years at Univision, now known as TelevisaUnivision, and Friday, December 13th, was the last day he hosted the network’s last primetime newscast.
Following a tribute to Ramos’ career at the network, the TV anchor shared a few departing words to viewers at home.
“This is my last newscast. It’s been more than 38 years in this exact location. I started at 28 years of age, without gray hair and now I am 66 as you can see,” Ramos said. “Not too long ago, I did math, and I hosted about 8,000 newscasts.”
We’ve been expecting this day ever since both Univision and Ramos announced that they were parting ways. As we noted at the time:
For the last decade, we’ve described Univision as an activist organization with a broadcast license and regurgitator of Democrat talking points. These assessments were driven, primarily, by the performance of Jorge Ramos as lead anchor and public face of the news division. For over a decade, MRC Latino has made crystal clear that there could be no true reform at Univision so long as Ramos remained in place. Now that he’s on his way out, we’ll see just how serious the reformers are.
Jorge Ramos wasn’t just the face of Univision, but was also the face of Spanish-language news media in the United States. On the one hand, he embodied the American Dream: arriving to the United States as a penniless young man who chased his dreams and achieved the apex of his profession. On the other, the policy positions (and, by extension, candidates) he advocated for represented the foreclosure of the American Dream to everyone else coming in behind him.
Ramos devoted his powerful voice and platform to the advocacy for unrestricted open borders at the expense of everything else, and platformed open-border candidates above all else. Ramos lent his credibility to the idea of Hispanics being a monolith voting bloc and immigration being the community’s apex issue- an illusion that was shattered when Donald Trump descended the gilded escalator at his eponymous Tower.
Rather than considering voices who strayed from orthodoxy, he labelled those who disagreed with his stances as race-traitors. He infamously penned a column cheering the 2016 primary defeat of Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio because of their positions on immigration.
But Ramos’s rigid orthodoxies blinded him to the change that was happening within the Hispanic community: Hispanics, in ever increasing numbers, rejected his racialist appeals and voted for Donald Trump.
Ramos, who believed the gushing coverage accorded to him by the Resistance Media, failed to course correct or adjust for these changes. His toxic race essentialiist discourse never considered that Hispanics might WANT to be part of the nation we live in, rather than a permanent alien class forever separate from the American mainstream. 2024 left him on the outside looking in, and now he’s out. He won’t be missed.
