By Randy Foreman, White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON – (NewsBlaze) If you are an undocumented illegal Mexican immigrant worried about deportation, you could not have chosen a more pathetic public spokesman for your cause than Univision Anchor Jorge Ramos.
Ramos, at a Dubuque, Iowa news conference with Republican Frontrunner candidate Donald Trump decided that he needed to conduct himself sympatico to someone who busted across the southern border. Ramos interrupted his fellow scribes and displayed his marginal self importance.
The Spanish language news anchor decided to stand on the left so he could look more important than his fellow reporters. As soon as Trump walked into the room, Ramos decided he had to open his mouth.
Look at it from Trump’s perspective, as someone who hosted the Apprentice when he was in the board room. People who spoke out of order did not get very far with him.
It was no surprise that Trump had to do what he did in saying “Excuse me, sit down,” Trump said. “You weren’t called. Sit down. Sit down!”
As someone who has covered the Obama White House Monday thru Friday since last November for NewsBlaze.com, in an openly adversarial position to the Adminstration, I feel no sympathy whatsoever for Ramos. Ramos, in my humble opinion should not have received accolades from Carl Cameron on Fox News as someone regarded as a tough reporter but rather as a sputtering apparatus awaiting approval from the patent office.
Admittedly, I don’t have the same journalistic experience as my colleagues do in the White House Press corps, which is I think, to my benefit. But I notice and have learned and studied how questions are taken by the White House Spokesperson. Most days in the James Brady Briefing Room, I am able to get a seat but many times the 49 seats in the room are taken by other media organizations and people have to stand on the side.
I can only imagine, if I attempted the same act as Ramos as White House Spokesman Josh Earnest walks up onto the podium after the two minute warning is called what would happen – Christi Parsons and Carol Lee of Correspondent’s association would be at the least frowning at me and the Obama White House would delight in the opportunity to spin that on MSNBC. However, Earnest, as I observed, has a habit of cycling through the room better than his predecessors such as Robert Gibbs who only called on the front bench, so there is no real need to do that. So if you can sit through at least two weeks of briefings, chances are your question is going to get taken.
But reporters do try the White House Spokesman. In one such exchange with a radio reporter this year, Earnest shut down the reporter by saying “a lot of good that did us. See you tomorrow” and ended the briefing. You can throw the tough bomb question and they need to be thrown but the Sam Donaldson act does not really work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.
Which brings us back to Ramos. Who really now remembers a thing about his questions? Most of the presentations of the Trump-Ramos exchange have Ramos in barely understandable audio and his words printed on the screen as though they had just been translated from Spanish.
What will be remembered, as Trump will likely surge in the polls, will be Trump saying “Go back to Univision” and Ramos seemingly unable to grasp reality that many Mexican immigrants are not the wholesome dreamers that they are made out to be.
Trump gave Ramos plenty of rope, too much. Ramos, unfortunately just doesn’t know when to shut his mouth. When you ask a question, you need to shut up and listen, so you can hear what the answer is. That is not the mark of a real journalist, it is the mark of a self-important bigmouth who only wants to shut down the other person.
Jorge Ramos may be a Univision anchor, but he showed he couldn’t anchor a blow-up dinghy in a small pond, and blew his chance to engage Donald Trump.
It was a total failure by Ramos.
At the very least, if there was some Hispanic Association out there planning to give him an image award for his performance in the midwestern Mississippi River Town, they should ask for it back.
