Television newscaster Mirthala Salinas, who was suspended without pay for two months in August after her affair with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa became public, is scheduled to return to work Monday. But she won't be taking up her old job as a fill-in anchor on evening newscasts for KVEA-TV Channel 52.
Instead, executives with the Spanish-language Telemundo network confirmed Monday that Salinas would be sent to the station's Inland Empire bureau in Riverside as a general assignment reporter, a notable fall for a one-time rising star who has become one of the most recognizable faces in local Spanish-language television.
Telemundo President Don Browne delivered the news Monday to workers at KVEA's Burbank headquarters. Browne also told the station's news staff that they would undergo ethics training this week by faculty members from the Poynter Institute, an authority on journalism practices.
Browne had previously criticized Salinas and her superiors for allowing a conflict of interest to fester as she continued to cover stories about the mayor while she was involved with him romantically.
It was Salinas, sitting in the anchor's chair, who delivered the news in June that Villaraigosa and his wife, Corina, were separating after 20 years of marriage -- an episode singled out by the Telemundo chief as a "flagrant violation" of the network's news guidelines.
In the aftermath of Villaraigosa's July 3 admission of the affair, the network conducted an internal review that resulted in Salinas' suspension, triggering criticism from media watchdogs who thought the punishment was too light.
On Monday, Telemundo spokesman Alfredo Richard said that the network and KVEA, one of its top stations, had learned a valuable lesson.
Reassigning Salinas to Riverside, he said, was meant to correct the ethics lapse and keep Salinas from reporting on Villaraigosa. Another official said station executives also were concerned about shielding Salinas from lingering animosity toward her in the newsrooms of KVEA and its sister station, KNBC-TV Channel 4, which share the same Burbank facility. Both stations are owned by NBC Universal.
"The whole spirit of this is to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest," Richard said. "As difficult as this process has been, we are coming out of it more determined than ever to comply with our ethics guidelines."
