Professor Charlie Beckett
About
Professor Charlie Beckett is the founding director of Polis, the think-tank for research and debate around international journalism and society in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Polis has a Summer School, holds conferences and publishes reports. Charlie is the director of the LSE's JournalismAI project that works with news organisations around the world to help them use AI responsibly. Charlie was Lead Commissioner for the LSE's Truth, Trust and Technology Commission that reported in 2018. Charlie Beckett is a regular commentator on journalism and politics for the UK and International media.
Charlie is the author of SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World (Blackwell, 2008) and WikiLeaks: News In The Networked Era (Polity, 2012). His new book, Reimagining Journalism in the AI Era will be published by Routledge in autumn 2026.
Prior to joining LSE, Charlie was a programme editor at ITN's Channel 4 News. Before that he was a senior producer and programme editor at BBC News and Current affairs for ten years. He started his career on local newspapers in his native South London before starting in TV at LWT.
Charlie specialises in how journalism around the world is changing and its relationship to society and politics.
Expertise
Artificial Intelligence; broadcasting; digital; emotions; ethics; future of news; governance; international media; media economics; networked journalism; newspapers; political journalism, social media; terror reporting; US media; WikiLeaks; political communication
Research
Research interests
- News media change, social media, media economics and networked journalism
- Journalism and politics in the UK and internationally in the digital age
- Journalism and terrorism, strategic communications
Current research projects and initiatives
Teaching
Charlie convenes and teaches on the postgraduate course Critical Studies in Media and Journalism and the Summer School short course International Journalism and Society - The Role of the Media in the Modern World.
He also runs the popular Media and Communications in Action talks, a speaker series combining theory and practice, hosted as part of the core postgraduate course Theories and Concepts in Media and Communications. Speakers include a mixture of practitioners, regulators, journalists, and other media professionals.