Max Binks-Collier

Blogger
Journalist

Max Binks-Collier is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist who specializes in writing long-form features and investigative reporting. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The Walrus, the Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Canadian Bar Association National Magazine, among other publications. 

As a journalist, he thinks a lot about the philosophy and practice of journalistic objectivity, journalism’s potential to simultaneously be an art form and means of producing empirical knowledge, and the political and epistemic implications of various media business models. For him, the Centre for Free Expression is a forum for thinking through these topics and others like them with likeminded people. 

Max has also researched Canada’s access-to-information legal framework for the Centre for Free Expression, reflecting not only his commitment to working with the Centre to produce information in the public interest, but also his broader interest in the legislation and jurisprudence that uphold—or undermine—civil liberties.

Related

Blog May 16, 2023

What Ida B. Wells can teach journalists about the value of objectivity

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the 2020 murder of George Floyd, many journalists argued that the press needed to abandon its traditional commitment to objectivity. Electrifying a decades-old skepticism of objectivity with a sense of political crisis, these journalists charged that while objectivity purports to be about neutrality, it really only serves power.
Max Binks-Collier
Freedom of the Press
Blog April 8, 2022

How private organizations and public institutions converge to create misinformation

A recent bombshell of a book about the corporate capture of Alberta’s energy regulator sheds light on how private organizations and public institutions sometimes converge into powerful networks that disseminate misinformation. The peer-reviewed book elucidates the inner workings of this phenomenon by developing an approach to analyzing institutional influence and dysfunction that can be used by investigative journalists, scholars, and anyone else opposed to abuses of state and corporate power.  
Max Binks-Collier
Disinformation