From Vox.com….
NationalNational Geographic was ahead of the curve.
While it took last summer’s uprisings after the police killing of George Floyd for many media outlets to address bias in their reporting and newsroom culture, the magazine announced its own racial reckoning in 2018. That year it dedicated its April issue to the topic of race, and Susan Goldberg — the first woman to be the magazine’s editor-in-chief — publicly acknowledged the publication’s long history of racism in its coverage of people of color in the US and abroad.
“Until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,” Goldberg wrote in an editor’s letter introducing the issue. “Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.”
Goldberg vowed that the magazine would face up to its past and do better, and the Race Issue was meant to be the beginning of a larger reexamination for the magazine. While the issue received its fair share of criticism, especially for a cover story that critics felt made simplistic assumptions about the idea of a post-racial future, it was a major statement by a publication that had long seemed to believe itself beyond reproach. The media industry was watching for what came next.
