“Are they really listening?”Īll staffers who spoke to Vox did so on condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution by a publication that retains social and economic power in the media industry. Still, “it’s a lot of teaching all the time,” one staffer said. They’ve had an impact, including producing a list of resources to improve diversity and representation in the story assignment process. It has largely been up to junior staffers, many of them people of color, to push the magazine to deliver on the kinds of promises it made in the Race Issue, staffers say.
Multiple staffers of color also describe a culture that left them feeling devalued and demeaned. Vox spoke with nearly 20 current and former National Geographic staffers, ranging from administrative assistants to editorial leadership, who described instances in which employees tried to speak up about racial insensitivities in coverage, only to have their concerns brushed aside or ignored, even after the magazine had publicly pledged to do better.
That’s a risk that a lot of companies, not just media outlets, run in the months and years following last summer’s public reckoning around racism and anti-Blackness - will they make good on their Instagram posts and supportive statements with tangible work once public attention is elsewhere? It’s a high-profile example of the complicated path to significant and lasting change, and what happens when a public pronouncement isn’t matched by meaningful action. The magazine is still struggling to make good on its promise of a new approach to covering the world. National Geographicīut change has been slow and difficult over the past three years, and many current and former staffers deem it inadequate. In National Geographic’s 2018 Race Issue, editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg vowed to “rise above” the magazine’s racist past. The media industry was watching for what came next. 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. 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. “Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages-every type of cliché.” “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. 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. 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. National Geographic was ahead of the curve.