Perhaps you've heard that advocates for the developmentally disabled are calling for a boycott of the new movie "Tropic Thunder" because the dialogue in the Ben Stiller war comedy includes repeated use of the word "retard."

Cable TV news operations have started paying attention to the boycott call - some going to the ridiculous extremes of referring to "retard" as "The R Word" and calling the controversy "RetardGate" - and Fox, for its part, had Special Olympics CEO Timothy Shriver on the air this morning, making the case for the public to skip the movie.

And what happens every time a TV news operation reports on the controversy? It shows a clip from the movie, of course!

Don't the opponents realize that all they're doing is giving the movie free publicity?

And as anyone in advertising will tell you, there's no such thing as bad free publicity.