I stared incredulously at my computer screen. The headline from The Huffington Post read: “Pat Robertson: Haiti Cursed By Pact To The Devil.””This cannot be serious,” I thought to myself. Unfortunately, it was. I felt a little part of me die as I clicked the link to read the article.

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” Pat Robertson said over national television. “They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘okay it’s a deal’… ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

Robertson’s display of impudence and intolerance towards those suffering in Haiti is disgraceful, and the ignorance of this statement is beyond question. What bothers me most about his comments, however, is not even what was said, but the way our media reacted to it. While publicly denouncing Robertson for being tactless and politically incorrect, Americans secretly savored the spiciness of fresh scandal.

Pat Robertson is a lot like the class-clown from third grade. Remember that kid who would do anything to get attention? He knew, better than anyone, that negative attention drew the spotlight almost effortlessly. He’d mimic the teacher or say something really obscene just so the teacher would call him to the front of the room or write his name on the chalkboard. Everyone else in class encouraged him by laughing and repeating what he’d said.

Watching him misbehave was far more interesting than reciting multiplication tables. You never liked that kid very much, but he was certainly entertaining, and, to this day, you haven’t forgotten his name.

Pat Robertson is the grown-up version of that kid. Our media is his biggest conspirator. We are his peers and his most loyal audience.

Just minutes after Robertson had commented on Haiti, the media was abuzz. Blogs popped up all over the web, news channels added it to their nightly programs, radio shows had a field day, and newspapers identified it as a big story. Robertson became an instant celebrity, and his absurdly outrageous statement was immortalized.

Scandalous, vulgar, comments are the bread and butter of today’s entertainment, and it needs to change. Because we put such a premium on controversy, we have actually created an incentive for people to do and say horrible things.

There will always be someone saying something offensive and outrageous. If we stopped giving so much emphasis and attention to them, however, we could rob these statements of their power and clean up our trashy image at the same time. We are the media’s number one consumers, and the choice is ours.