BY: Kate Linderman
Sally Ramirez had reached the peak of a producer’s career. With decades of experience, she was tasked with building CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” from the ground up. The show aired for two years before the network announced the show’s cancellation last month putting Ramirez out of a job.
While one might think she’d join her husband in retirement, Ramirez said her career isn’t over. She said, “I would do it all over again,” referring to the CNBC show, and she said she is taking time to consider new job opportunities.
Ramirez has been a producer her entire career and says she was “born to be a journalist.” She started at USA Today’s The Television Show after completing her degree at DePaul University, worked her way through local networks across the country and ultimately ended up as the executive producer at CNBC’s ‘The News with Shepard Smith.’
Working with reporters throughout her career, she says the relationship is critical. “You have to trust your reporter and the reporter needs to trust you,” she said.
There are discrepancies between producers and reporters about what ultimately ends up on TV. Reporters may be in the field working on their own story, but Ramirez is behind the scenes curating the entire show.
“It’s a team who puts a show together. It’s not an individual,” she said, adding, “I would line produce the story that you’re telling from this, you know, open your show till the goodbye. The reporter is just part of that story. They have a story within a larger story that you’re trying to tell.”
From the show’s start to the end, Ramirez’s top priority is producing the truth. In the age of social media, she finds that to be more critical than ever. Misinformation, incorrect or misleading information, and disinformation, false information indented to deceive people, have constantly circulated social media since its inception.
Social media creates the buzz for potential stories, but false information is rampant on social media. In newsrooms, “When do you cover a story, you know, as a true, circulating everywhere?”
While a breaking story may get caught in misinformation that should be later corrected, Ramirez says that on-air TV is no place to address disinformation.
“Those are really hard to justify giving them any airtime,” she said. “They’re so ludicrous, it’s like really like that too. They’re looking for more attention. They’re way more extreme.”
Though Ramirez says she does not know what comes next, she knows that her journalism career will continue.
“I tell everybody that I work with the best of the best on that team, to a person, their true professionals, excellent journalists, and I have zero regrets,” she said.
-30-