Lifetime TV Beats Up on Divorced Dads

Article here. Excerpt:

'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."

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.
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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.'