Jorge Ramos Is Not Walter Cronkite
In his 2002 memoir, “No Borders: A Journalist’s Search for Home,” Ramos recounts that in 1991 he was elbowed in the stomach and knocked to the ground by a bodyguard after accosting a politician, peppering him with questions and making an uncomfortable declaration. This time, the politician was President Fidel Castro of Cuba, and what Ramos said was, “Many people believe that this is the time for you to call for an election.” At the last word, the bodyguard’s elbow struck.
.. Yet in his books, the person he presents as his North Star is not Cronkite but Oriana Fallaci, the fierce Italian journalist who faced off with Yasir Arafat, Muammar el-Qaddafi and Ayatollah Khomeini. (Christopher Hitchens was another of her outspoken admirers.) Henry Kissinger once confessed that his interview with Fallaci — in which he called himself a “cowboy” and pleaded helplessly for her to stop asking questions about the Vietnam War — was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press.”
.. It is precisely this pattern of confrontation — not his poker-faced anchoring of the nightly news with his colleague Maria Elena Salinas on “Noticiero Univisión” — that has won Ramos the trust of so many Hispanics. They know that in many countries south of the United States, direct questions can provoke not simply a loss of access but also a loss of life.