Villaraigosa, Salinas, and Journalistic Propriety (Not as Boring As It Sounds. Promise!)

Posted by: Jon Fine on July 06

Mickey Kaus asks a bunch of pointed questions regarding the Mayor of Los Angeles’ interesting situation with his new(ish) girlfriend. I like this argument:

Telemundo finally has someone everybody wants to see! So of course they … take her off the air. Estupido MSM. … What’s wrong with an hour Mirthala Salinas special? They could add bilingual subtitles for the millions of new Telemundo viewers. … But no. They’d rather please Howie Kurtz. (Or maybe it’s a respectability play: “See! We’re as much of a doomed hidebound media organization as all the doomed hidebound English-language media organizations!”)

Remember that Salinas had become an anchor, and I think we can all agree that most TV anchors do very little in the way of actual reporting these days. They’re what the Brits call “tv presenters.”

I’d be totally behind Kaus were it not for one thing: This report from ERS News, which says that Salinas’ bosses had asked three times recently if she’d been having an affair with Villaraigosa—and she denied it every time.

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up, etc. Lying to your bosses about something material is a lot harder to overlook in a situation in which the optics are already, uhm, pretty bad.

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