Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want.

When Don Imus uttered the now-infamous phrase ‘nappy-headed hos’ over the airwaves, he made a conscious decision to simultaneously promulgate two layers of hate speech ‘ the racially motivated ‘nappy-headed’ and the sexist ‘hos’ to boot.

As a member of the press who loves flaunting his own freedom of speech, I’m all for defending the entitlements of journalists and broadcasters alike in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

This instance, however, does not fall under that category. Rather, what Imus produced was, quite simply, slander.

Newspapers, including this one, are protected against libel ‘ written, false defamation of character ‘ by the watchful eyes of editors, who hopefully invoke their best judgment in deciding whether or not to print questionable statements, whether they are presented as opinions or not.

Before this column reaches your eyes, several Pipe Dream editors will comb through my words carefully, looking for misplaced commas, incorrect spelling and, most importantly, libel.

Unfortunately for Don Imus, he didn’t have the luxury of editors. Having hosted his radio show for 28 years, having survived the reflux of many a controversial phrase before, Imus was certainly familiar with the immediate impact that his words have on his audience.

If I, a fellow sports writer, or anyone else at Pipe Dream, ever openly slandered a team, student group or individual to any degree close to ‘nappy-headed hos’ ‘ and somehow, God forbid, it made it to print ‘ I guarantee that columnist’s words would never again appear in Pipe Dream, or any respectable campus publication. The outcry would be overwhelming ‘ and justifiably so.

It’s important not to generalize ‘nappy-headed hos’ with other phrases that Imus has uttered in the past, which had earned him the moniker of ‘Shock Jock.’ Imus has a storied history of ‘shocking’ his audience with speech that often could be construed as offensive to, among others, blacks, women, American Indians and homosexuals.

‘Nappy-headed hos,’ though, was different because of whom it targeted. The Rutgers women’s basketball team, despite their status in the limelight at the time, is certainly not considered a group of ‘public figures,’ whom, according to the AP Style guide, are remarkably difficult to defame.

A quick scan of Wikipedia shows that most of the figures that Imus has ‘shocked’ in the past are, indeed, public figures. Nobody flinched when ‘The I-Man’ called the New York Knicks ‘chest-thumping pimps,’ and his description of New York Times sports reporter Bill Rhoden, an African-American, as a ‘quota hire’ could potentially be justified under both the public figure and the ‘it’s not slander if it’s true’ defenses.

But Imus’ description of the Scarlet Knights as ‘hos’ was completely baseless and wrong. His attacks on a group of young women which had no means to defend itself publicly were reprehensible. Removing Don Imus from his job, no matter what his audience, was the correct move, as there is no room in the public forum for people to spew hate speech and think they can escape with a simple apology.