S. Robert Lichter (born 1948) is Professor of Communication at George Mason University, where he directs the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which conducts scientific studies of the news and entertainment media, and the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), which works to improve the quality of statistical and scientific information in the news.

Lichter has taught political science at Princeton, Georgetown, and George Washington universities, and he was a research faculty member at Yale University and Columbia University. He was also a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Smith College and held the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Mass Communications at the American Enterprise Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard Universityand his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota. He has received a Goldsmith Research Award from Harvard University and the Solimene Award of Excellence from the American Medical Writers Association.

Lichter has authored or co-authored fourteen books and over a hundred scholarly articles and monographs on the news and entertainment media. His best-known work, The Media Elite, (written with Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter) argued that journalists, on average, held more liberal political views than the general public, and that their backgrounds and outlooks affect their coverage of the news.