Book Review : National Geographic Is Put on the Spot

National Geographic: Behind America’s Lens on the World by Howard S. Abramson (Crown: $17.95)

Dare I confess that I have never been a reader of the National Geographic? I used to thumb through it in doctors’ waiting rooms, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand why so many people seemed to like it or why doctors felt impelled to have it around.

Not that I ever gave it much thought, mind you. There was something about that magazine that seemed vaguely irrelevant. The pictures and the maps were pretty enough, but the syrupy text pushed me away.

Now, having read Howard S. Abramson’s “National Geographic: Behind America’s Lens on the World,” I know why the magazine, which has more subscribers than any other except Reader’s Digest and TV Guide, has always made me shrug. It is technically proficient but soulless, Abramson says.

It looks at the world through rose-colored glasses and offers a Pollyanna view of foreign countries. In its pages, one seldom finds dictators, hunger, poverty or repression. The world is a swell place in the pages of the National Geographic. Even as a child I knew that wasn’t true.

Negative Details Ignored

Abramson calls this the “Marie Antoinette school of geography.” Negative details are ignored, and if a place’s negatives are so pervasive that they cannot be ignored, the place itself is ignored.

But that’s not all. Abramson, a financial editor at the Washington Post, has written an unflattering but apparently accurate history of the magazine and its parent, the National Geographic Society, which he describes as a major publishing company masquerading as a nonprofit, educational, public-benefit corporation.

The difference is more than semantic. The society’s operations bring in more than $300 million a year, and the net profit exceeds $30 million. But because the profits are not distributed to shareholders, almost all of the income is tax-exempt, as are the society’s valuable land holdings in Washington.

Yet, as Abramson amply notes, the National Geographic Society could hardly be confused with a charity. Its employees live it up at company expense, spending lavishly and riding around Washington in chauffeur-driven limousines.

“Why is the National Geographic Society considered a nonprofit organization?” Abramson asks near the end of the book. “For what educational purpose does it exist? Other than for dispersal of income, how does it differ from the nation’s for-profit publishing conglomerates?” If there is an answer, only the Internal Revenue Service knows it.

Tracing Its History

Abramson traces the society from its founding by Alexander Graham Bell and others in 1888 through its dominance by the Grosvenor family for nearly all of its history to the near-sacrosanct position it has achieved and held through most of this century. He details the society’s role in establishing Robert E. Peary’s dubious claim to having reached the North Pole in 1909, and he quotes with tacit agreement the charge against the society that was made by Frederick A. Cook, whose claim to having gotten there first was dismissed by history and the court of public opinion:

The society’s role, Cook wrote, “is generally misunderstood because of its pretentious use of the word National. In reality, it is neither national nor geographic. It is a kind of self-admiration society. . . . It has no connection with the government and has no geographic authority save that which it assumes.”

Despite Abramson’s animosity, his description of the society is not one-sided. He gives credit where credit is due. The National Geographic pioneered and implemented many technical advances in photography and in the publication of pictures--particularly color pictures. It did indeed aid in the discovery of Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca city in Peru, and in some lesser finds. Its map and picture libraries of foreign countries were called on by the United States during World War II, and they proved invaluable to the war effort.

But his conclusion is clearly stated and well supported. “The National Geographic Society seems a good idea run amok,” he writes. “A group of well-intentioned people in 1888 founded an organization to expand man’s knowledge of himself and his world. Other well-intentioned people made a success of the organization, eventually putting it in a position financially where it could afford to realize its founders’ dreams and more.

‘Dedicated to Own Survival’

“And in the end it has not only failed to have a major impact on geography and exploration, but is as money-hungry as any publishing and mail-order conglomerate could be. . . . The National Geographic Society is today an organization dedicated only to its own survival.”

This is not the first time that the society’s methods have been questioned and its shortcomings exposed to public view, but Abramson’s is the fullest treatment that this subject has yet received. It provides yet more evidence (as if more evidence were needed) that not everything in life is what it is cracked up to be.

Obviously, many people like to read the National Geographic, and apparently doctors do too. They’re all entitled. But perhaps the government should look into the society’s tax-exempt status. Is this really what Congress had in mind when it recognized the need for charitable and public-spirited organizations and agreed to subsidize them by forgoing their tax revenues?

On the scale of life’s inequities, this hardly ranks high. But it is worth thinking about, and Abramson has done a good job laying out the questions and suggesting the answers.