L.A. mayor's girlfriend demoted by TV station

Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa speaks in Los Angeles October 27, 2006. The television anchor who covered stories on the mayor of Los Angeles -- without publicly revealing that she was the mayor's girlfriend -- has been reassigned to a distant outpost after being suspended for two months without pay, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The television anchor who covered stories on the mayor of Los Angeles -- without publicly revealing that she was the mayor's girlfriend -- has been reassigned to a distant outpost after being suspended for two months without pay, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

Mirthala Salinas, a former rising star at Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo's KVEA, will return to work next Monday as a general assignment reporter in Riverside, a desert city 55 miles east of Los Angeles, the paper said.

Salinas lost her job as a substitute anchor on KVEA's evening news broadcast after her affair with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa became public. Salinas had delivered the news in June that Villaraigosa and his wife, Corina, were separating after 20 years of marriage.

Telemundo President Don Browne described the incident as a "flagrant violation" of the network's news guidelines. The Los Angeles Times said the station's news staff would undergo ethics training.

The newspaper said it was not clear if Salinas would accept the new role, noting that her contract expires in December.

Telemundo is a unit of General Electric Co's NBC Universal.