Whose free speech is it when the speech is not yours, but that of a commenter?

As more and more mainstream media outfits resort to the Internet, we'll see more and more stories like this one, asking more and more questions:

Was it ethical, then, for NYTimes.com to publish a text accusing pope Benedict XVI of being a Nazi?

Toby Usnik, the Times' director of public relations seems to think so. "We choose not to censor such posts unless they are abusive, defamatory or obscene. While we believe that this post stretches the truth of the pope's youth, we do not believe it violates our policies," he informed UPI.

"This calls for another insulin shot," fumed Baroni. "It would clearly be abusive if you labeled a black man with the 'N word,'" he said.

"But in the Times' mindset there's evidently nothing defamatory about calling a German pope a Nazi -- in other words a member of a species guilty of a genocide."

I think I'm more vehemently opposed to censorship than most people, but even I have felt obliged to delete comments occasionally. (Spam is another issue; I get thousands of spam comments, but I don't consider them to be genuine speech, as they're automated and impersonal and have nothing to do with my blog's content.) Typically, I'll delete the kind of comments which:

Comments I've deleted have included gratuitous use of the "n" word, insulting sexual references of no persuasive value, or mindless ad hominem invective. If (for example) I am told crudely to go and perform sexual relations with myself in an anatomically impossible manner, I don't see how this assists anyone in understanding or debating the merits of any argument, so I'll delete it. (If it's particularly memorable, as in it was when someone called me on the phone with an anatomically impossible request, I'll comment on it myself.)

It bothers me to have to delete comments, though, and I don't like being ordered around by robotic software like SONICWall, but this is a tradeoff. I'd rather have ordinary readers get through than have the whole blog blocked because of something I never said which adds nothing.

While a comment about the "Nazi Pope" is as irresponsible as it is wrong, I am not at all sure that I blame the New York Times. However, if there were a lot of similar comments posted with few to the contrary (like this Atrios thread*), I think it would be fair to engage in speculation about whether the rest of the Times' readership felt the same way.

The Times is not obligated to provide them with a forum any more than I am. And much as I am against censoring even my own commenters, I try to make it clear what I think.

What I find odious about this incident is not that the comment was left or that the Times refused to delete it, but that they'd characterize it merely as "stretch[ing] the truth of the pope's youth." The heading "Nazi pope a clear and present danger to the civilized world" does a lot more than that.

Perhaps the Times could take a lesson from Daily Kos, which said this about the "Nazi Pope" smear:

Calling him a Nazi, however, is unfounded and unfair, and only serves to demean us.

* The comments -- in fact the entire thread -- has been eliminated, but my previous post gives a general idea of what was there.