Verizon criticized for dumb dad ad

NEW YORK – A TV ad showing a computer-illiterate father getting chided for trying to help his Internet-savvy daughter with her homework has roused the anger of fatherhood activists, who are calling on Verizon to take it off the air.

“Leave her alone,” says the wife-mother in the Verizon DSL ad, ordering her befuddled husband to go wash the dog as the daughter, doing research on the computer, conveys a look of exasperation with her father.

“It’s really outrageous,” said Joe Kelly, executive director of the national advocacy group Dads and Daughters.

“It’s reflective of some deeply entrenched cultural attitudes – that fathers are second-class parents, that they’re not really necessary,” Kelly said. “To operate from the assumption that dad is a dolt is harmful to fathers, harmful to children, and harmful to mothers.”

John Bonomo, a Verizon spokesman, said Tuesday the ad has been running for several months. But only a few days ago did it come to the attention of Glenn Sacks, a commentator who hosts a weekly radio show aired in Los Angeles, Boston and New York that is sympathetic to the fathers’ rights movement.

After watching the ad, Sacks began urging listeners of “His Side” to protest to Verizon – contending that the company would not have commissioned a comparable ad with the parents’ genders reversed. He said more than 1,100 protest e-mails had been sent through his show’s Web site to Verizon within the first two days of the campaign.

“By denigrating that guy, not simply with his wife but to show him to be useless with his little daughter, I know that made a lot of people see red,” said Sacks, who has a school-age daughter of his own.

Bonomo said Verizon had received numerous calls and e-mails in the past couple of days about the ad, but had not yet decided on what sort of response might be made.

“All we can say at this point is we’re looking at it,” he said. “We’re obviously dismayed that some customers find one of our commercials offensive.”