Given Big Tech's ham handed censorship over COVID topics--which I have had direct experience--I am more troubled by the Zuckerberg grant than the RWJ grant. Foundations like RWJ, in order to preserve their tax exempt status, have to maintain discrete distance from the corporations that spawned them, which would be from a corporate and journalistic ethics standpoint a pretty good rebuttal to general claims of conflict of interest as far as J&J is concerned.
Whether specific articles could be defended against such claims is inherently problematic--there's no good way for me to answer at that level.
However, the broader question is why a news magazine, particularly one with the Atlantic's history, would need private funding or to have news projects "commissioned".
From the Atlantic's original mission statement (signed by such literary luminaries of the 19th century as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe):
"Third: In Politics, The Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It will not rank itself with any sect of anties, but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private."
Given Big Tech's ham handed censorship over COVID topics--which I have had direct experience--I am more troubled by the Zuckerberg grant than the RWJ grant. Foundations like RWJ, in order to preserve their tax exempt status, have to maintain discrete distance from the corporations that spawned them, which would be from a corporate and journalistic ethics standpoint a pretty good rebuttal to general claims of conflict of interest as far as J&J is concerned.
Whether specific articles could be defended against such claims is inherently problematic--there's no good way for me to answer at that level.
However, the broader question is why a news magazine, particularly one with the Atlantic's history, would need private funding or to have news projects "commissioned".
From the Atlantic's original mission statement (signed by such literary luminaries of the 19th century as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe):
"Third: In Politics, The Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It will not rank itself with any sect of anties, but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private."
https://www.theatlantic.com/history/
Private commissions for news coverage rather flies in the face of this commitment.