We’re told that pointing out deficiencies in other news coverage breaks journalistic taboos. Blanket statements about mass media hyperbole fall into the same category. Words like “outrage”, “shocking” and “tragic” have become ubiquitous in daily headlines. Their use is a common method for attracting consumers and the billions of dollars in advertising revenue generated by their readership and viewership.

The brevity of our daily news cycle gives way to end-of-days fearmongering, the newest round of Kardashian butt implants and vile, disgusting people riding the coattails of national tragedy to further personal agendas.

Ringmaster Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Circus have once again found their way onto the national news radar, exploiting human tragedy in what’s left of Joplin, Mo.

In their newest round of proselytism, Phelps and his cronies celebrate the rising death toll in Joplin as proof that, as they say, “God Hates Fags.”

Some folks are inclined to attribute the increase in severe weather to global warming. Some wearing foil hats babble on about 2012 or the other impending rapture.

However, 71 idiots from Topeka, Kan. insist it’s all because our society ‘tolerates the homosexual agenda.’

The irony is that the very mention of Phelps and WBC makes us hypocrites of the worst kind. We ask that our readers and our fellow journalists stop giving them the attention they so desperately clamor for. But in doing so, we only shine the spotlight on them more brightly.

Irritants like Phelps are much like mosquito bites. They bother us only as long as we attend to them. Just as the sensation of a mosquito bite goes away once we stop itching it, the influence Phelps and his followers have will diminish as soon as we stop publicizing them.