A Tawdry Affair

So the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, was banging the hot Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas. What's funny about this is that the folks at Telemundo knew about all this and still let her have a major role on the station. She also appears to have a track record of fucking people she's supposed to be covering. I know, sounds like she was covering them! Hey oh! I'm here all week.

Seriously, WTF? At the risk of going down a road I really shouldn't, for every female reporter busting their ass, there is a Salinas giving up their ass to the folks they cover. I know I'm going to get into trouble for this but as some who grew up around newsrooms and later worked in one, none of this is a newsflash. It happens.

Telemundo has now suspended Salinas to "investigate" whether she breached journalistic ethics by "having a relationship" (i.e., "fucking") the mayor. But the funniest part in all this is after Salinas came clean (insert cheap joke here) to her bosses about the relationship last year, they appear to have promoted her to anchor. In that role, she didn't necessarily cover the mayor, she just read lead-ins and lead-outs to other reporters covering the mayor. Yeah, that solves everything. Now, I'm not sure if I got all the facts right in this because honestly the coverage of the Telemundo angle of this story has so far sucked. Only now, a few days after the story of the mayor's affair and official demise of his marriage broke are the press realizing that maybe Telemundo has a credibility problem. But it appears that she was a political reporter who then became a newscaster if the stories I read are correct.

My point is that she should not have been allowed to be on the air at all given this poor judgement. Now who am I to deny true love. If that was what was happening and she told her bosses (as she claims she did) when it happened, the onus is on them. They should have not let her anywhere near local news because even if she's just the anchor it is still an apparent conflict. Her beat could have been switched or she could have joined a news operation elsewhere.

Even if Telemundo claims they didn't know all the details I'm guessing plenty of people at the station did and it was water cooler fodder. In other words, there was plenty of smoke but no one had the balls to yell "fire."

What is really amazing about all this is that this is--as far as I know from what I read in the LA Times--the third time that Salinas has gotten romantically linked to a Los Angeles politico while covering the beat. This track record should have had management concerned a long time ago but clearly they operated under the W.C. Fields rule of "it's only a crime if you get caught."

I don't know why I'm going on about this one especially since I'm not sure that I want to use this forum that I've created to wax on about an industry I'm still somewhat involved in. After all, can I have posts about my own tawdry existence mixed in with general commentary? Well, I guess so. BTW, I'm announcing my candidacy to be the Palms representative to City Council. Hey, why not? She's a hottie!