I read the guy briefly a couple of years ago while I was learning Spanish and asked La Vanguaria’s ombudsman and a couple of execs what they proposed to do about a London correspondent who was functionally illiterate in English and not averse to invention and plagiarism. Nothing, came the whisper from the cave.

Now someone has kindly drawn my attention to complaints by several readers, Eduard Rohaut and Armando Escudero Soler, about a piece by Ramos (which is, unfortunately, now behind the $-wall) dealing with the fate of the Winchester rifle’s New Haven plant. Soler and Rohaut point out that Ramos’ article swarms with untruths, to which Ramos replies that someone as busy as he can’t be expected to get the facts right. Since I have yet to find any definition of journalism that fails to include some clause about verification, my inference is that Ramos is not what he pretends to be: a journalist. If La Vanguardia feels embarrassed about adding a standard health warning to Ramos’ work (“This article may be substantially untrue”), then they have a duty to their readers to get rid of him. Or is arrogance a substitute for intelligence?

However, there is–as is usual with this guy–a second issue. Ramos says that his errors are also present in a variety of British and North American publications. If this is the case, then it would be helpful if he would name his erroneous sources in order to dispel the impression that his piece is nothing more than a reworking of a piece by Andrew Gumbel published in The Independent on January 21, which, if my recollection is correct, contains the same errors of fact and interpretation as Ramos’ article.

Categories: Les bourgeois

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