Andrea Carson is Associate Dean, Research, Industry and Engagement with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and a Professor of Political Communication at La Trobe University, specializing in the news media’s role in politics and quality of information in the public sphere.

In 2024, she was a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where she studied public trust in electoral bodies during elections, especially in the context of disinformation.

More broadly, her research examines media trust, political communication, gender politics, and regulating digital platforms. She has worked on comparing different regulatory approaches to handling misinformation and disinformation. Among her achievements, she holds several Australian Research Council grants, including one on political trust, and is the recipient of La Trobe University’s 2023 Vice Chancellor’s Overall Research Excellence Award.

Her work is widely published in leading journals, and she has authored and co-edited several important books, including Investigative Journalism, Democracy and the Digital Age (2020) and Undercover Reporting, Deception, and Betrayal in Journalism (2023). She has also been awarded industry grants, such as from Meta, to study misinformation and digital journalism. Additionally, she advises governments and think tanks on misinformation and is a research fellow with the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia (WLIA) examining women’s political participation.

Professor Carson holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in International Politics from the University of Melbourne. Before entering academia, she was an award-winning journalist with experience in print, radio, and television. She is also the creator of Below the Line, a 2022 election podcast with The Conversation, featuring prominent political commentators.

You can find more details on her publications here: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?hl=en&user=YjX49fEAAAAJ