Why is the father always the villain on American TV?

2009-05-20 22:48:05 UTC

Its' the politicians who created this mess and the pressure groups that
wanted it!

Post by Dusty
Unfortunately, there is nothing about the NCP mothers that fail to pay.
That would have been interesting to see, eh?
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http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/18/anti-dad-bias/
EDITORIAL: Anti-Dad bias
Why is the father always the villain on American TV?
Monday, May 18, 2009
Strong families need strong fathers, but American television has come a
long way from the 1950s series "Father Knows Best."
Now Lifetime TV, a network known for its movies about women being
endangered by men, has sunk to a new low - a reality program called
"Deadbeat Dads."
In the beginning of gotcha TV, viewers enjoyed watching the police bust
down a door and haul away the bad guy on a show like "Cops." That same
format migrated over to Animal Planet, where the cops bust down the door
and arrest the man who has been starving his dogs or kicking his cats. Now
Lifetime is doing the same thing to divorced fathers.
Lifetime TV's new reality show, "Deadbeat Dads," centers around National
Child Support founder Jim Durham, who finds and confronts dads who do not
pay their child support. Reuters news agency reports that Mr. Durham
"functions as sort of a 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' for tracking deadbeats ...
it's ambush reality TV." However, the reality show, originally developed
at Fox as "Bad Dads" and later dropped, is Lifetime's attempt to take
cheap shots at men while ignoring the damage the show can cause children,
wives and other family members.
The Lifetime TV program ignores the numbers. More than 90 percent of
fathers with joint custody paid the support due, according to a Census
Bureau report (Series P-23, No. 173). So deadbeats are in the minority.
Also, most so-called deadbeat dads actually are dead broke. Two-thirds of
men who fail to make child-support payments earn poverty-level wages,
according to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Most of the
others are unemployed.
Bruce Walker, executive coordinator at the District Attorneys Council in
Oklahoma City, who ran the state's child-support enforcement program for
three years and jailed hundreds of fathers for nonpayment, told the Newark
Star-Ledger in 2002: "These men are seldom the mythical monsters described
by politicians."
"Many times I prosecuted impoverished men," he told the Star-Ledger. "I
prosecuted one deadbeat dad who had been hospitalized for malnutrition and
another who lived in the bed of a pickup truck."
Nor is it likely that Lifetime will ever show that some fathers simply
give money directly to their teenage children because some mothers end up
using child-support payments for everything but the child.
Child visitation and child support are tied together, at least in the
minds of many fathers. The largest federally funded study of child-support
payments was led by Arizona State University researcher Sanford Braver
over an eight-year period. Mr. Braver found that fathers with joint
custody pay 90.2 percent of all child support ordered. Fathers with
visitation rights pay 79.1 percent of all child support ordered. However,
fathers with no access or visitation rights to their children pay just
44.5 percent of the court-ordered child support. Much of Mr. Braver's data
was backed up in the Census Bureau report (Series P-23, No. 173).
But what about divorced moms who do not allow the father to visit his
children, despite court orders allowing him to do so? Another study,
"Visitational Interference: A National Study" by J. Annette Vanini and
Edward Nichols, found that 77 percent of noncustodial fathers are not able
to spend time with their children, as ordered by the court, as a result of
"visitation interference" perpetuated by the custodial parent. This would
mean that noncompliance with court-ordered visitation is three times the
problem of noncompliance with court-ordered child support. In short, lousy
moms outnumber deadbeat dads 3-1.
Will Lifetime TV be truthful about how often some mothers end a
relationship with the father, take custody of the children and refuse to
allow the father access to the children? Indeed, after the age of 40,
women initiate more divorces than men.
While sometimes it seems that Lifetime has an anti-male agenda, perhaps it
is simply pandering to embittered moms who make up the network's audience.
The full tragedy of the collapse of many American families remains untold.
It is a worthy subject, but it must be told without ideology; it must be
clear-eyed about the myriad ways men and women have failed each other.
Such radical honesty would make for compelling television and would be a
public service. Pity Lifetime is not daring enough to try it.