Station refusing to air Fox's 'Who's Your Daddy?'

NEW YORK - After protests from adoption advocates, a Fox affiliate in North Carolina chose not to air Monday's "Who's Your Daddy?" special, where an adoptive daughter tried to guess the identity of her birth father for a $100,000 prize.

So far, WRAZ-TV in Raleigh-Durham is the only one of 182 Fox station to respond to a plea from the National Council for Adoption that they not air the reality special, which the council said "would exploit the sensitive emotions of adoption."

The special features a woman and her birth father, who were both involved in simultaneous searches for one another. He was one of eight potential dads presented to her, and the woman won the money if she pinpointed him. If she was wrong, the impostor whom she chose would win a prize.

Producers said the pretaped special was a "positive experience" for both the woman and her father, and urged viewers not to prejudge it.

"The special was thoroughly vetted by our standards and practices department to ensure that it was appropriate for broadcast," said Scott Grogin, Fox spokesman. "However, any network affiliate that feels the programming may be inappropriate for their individual market has the right to pre-empt the schedule.

WRAZ-TV will instead air an independently produced film, "I Have Roots and Branches... Personal Reflections on Adoption," a film produced by a woman with an adopted child who interviewed adoptive families about their experiences.

"We just don't think adoption is a game show," Tommy Schenck, the station's vice president and general manager, said Monday.

Another station manager who is airing the show said he had received three e-mails complaining about it. Bill Lamb, general manager of WDRB-TV in Louisville, Kentucky, said the network didn't make the show available for him to see in advance and he didn't want to judge it sight unseen.

"I think it's just another one in a long line of tasteless Fox shows," Lamb said. "How do you differentiate one from another anymore?"

Thomas Atwood, president of the National Council for Adoption, said he believed his campaign to encourage Fox stations not to air it lost momentum because of the holidays.

"It exploits the sensitive emotions of adoption," Atwood said. "it trivializes them. Adoption is a very personal, meaningful experience and it should not be commercialized like this."

The Fox Television Studios has filmed six separate "Who's Your Daddy?" shows, but the network has not yet scheduled any of the others to air.