Barring a late settlement, talk-radio host Charlie Sykes faces a court date as a defendant in a libel suit this week.
The plaintiff, Spanish Journal editor Robert Miranda, sued Sykes in January over a November post on Sykes’ Weblog on the WTMJ-AM (620) site that alleged Miranda had helped foment a protest at a 1991 pro-Gulf War event in which several speakers were pelted with small objects. Miranda wasn’t in Wisconsin at the time of that protest, which Sykes described in his essay as an “an example of the assaults on free speech on university campuses.”
Although Miranda’s original requests for a court order mandating Sykes publicly apologize, undergo sensitivity training sessions and make diversity presentations to middle and high school students are no longer in play – a small-claims court doesn’t have that authority, it turns out – Miranda said the suit, which now requests the small-claims maximum of $5,000 in damages, will serve as a forum in which Sykes’ “journalistic integrity will be questioned,” among other matters.