[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/national_geographic_logo.png]]
[[caption-width-right:350:[[{{Tagline}} Further.]]]]

The National Geographic Society is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Its magazine publication and [[Creator/NationalGeographicChannel TV channel]] cover a wide range of topics, including geography, archaeology, natural science, anthropology and technology. The institution is known to strongly promote environmental and historical conservation, and the study and appreciation of culture from all over the globe. The National Geographic Society’s logo is a yellow rectangular portrait frame, which appears as margins on the front covers of its magazines and as its television channel logo.

Since 2015, National Geographic's media properties, including its flagship magazine, have been operated under the joint venture National Geographic Partners, which was majority owned by UsefulNotes/RupertMurdoch[='=]s 21st Century Fox, with National Geographic Society maintaining a minority interest. In 2019, Fox sold its stake in National Geographic Partners, along with the majority of its entertainment properties, to Creator/{{Disney}}, who plan to make National Geographic a major provider for content on their Creator/DisneyPlus service. In 2023, the magazine replaced its staff writers with a freelance model and announced that it would discontinue newsstand purchases in 2024.

The magazine is the TropeNamer for NationalGeographicNudity.
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!!Tropes in ''National Geographic'' include:

* BaitAndSwitchCredits: [[http://i.imgur.com/sBSkQ.jpg This]] infamous front-page article. [[spoiler: The cover asks "Was Darwin wrong?" and the first inside page states "No."]]
* DiamondsInTheBuff: One issue had a picture of a belt with huge gemstone beads and a quote from its creator, stating that he "imagined a woman emerging from the ocean wearing this belt and nothing else".
* MysteriousWaif: RealLife MysteriousWaif Sharbat Gula, called the Afghan Girl. She was photographed in an Afghan refugee camp. At the time the picture was taken, the photographer didn't know her name, and in 2002, she was successfully located and formally identified. Her photograph is the most recognized in Magazine/NationalGeographic history.[[note]]And in case you're wondering how being moderately famous improved her life...it didn't. At the time the picture was taken, Gula was twelve and had just been driven from her home, so she was understandably pissed off. And when she was found in 2002 and asked how she felt about being famous, she found that it was hard to care when your husband was working for a dollar a day and your asthma made it hard to breathe within your own polluted city.[[/note]]
* NationalGeographicNudity: The trope namer. There were frequent articles about tribes of people who wore little to no clothing and many people remember the photography of topless women that went with those articles.\\\
The media studies work ''Reading National Geographic'' found that, aside from choosing to represent areas of the world with images that reinforce specific themes (the Pacific islands are idyllic, East Asia is eccentric and a decade behind the times, African children smile when doing backbreaking labor, etc.), what nudity is permitted in ''National Geographic'' depends on who's doing it. African, Native American, and other "primitive" people get their naughty bits published, while European vacationers on a nude beach don't. And in a strange case of RaceLift, persons with borderline skin tones will have their skin ''darkened'' in order to be acceptably nude.
-->''"When I was an [[HormoneAddledTeenager adolescent]], the only reliable source of breast visuals was National Geographic, a magazine then devoted, as far as I can tell, to doing feature articles on every primitive tribe in the world in which the women went around topless. When I was in junior high school, my friends and I were '''extremely''' interested in these articles, specifically the photographs that had captions like "A young woman of the Mbonga tribe prepares supper using primitive implements." We would spend long periods of time staring at the young woman's implements, and we'd wonder how come we'd had the incredibly bad luck of being born in the one society in the entire world (judging from National Geographic) wherein women wore a lot of clothes."''
-->-Creator/DaveBarry
* ShirleyTemplate: An article about Los Angeles in the January 1979 issue shows [[https://archive.org/details/NationalGeographicMagazine197901January/page/n25/mode/2up a group of celebrity impersonators]], among them a child performer dressed up like Shirley Temple.
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