McCombs, Maxwell (1938–)

Maxwell E. McCombs, born in 1938 in Birmingham, Alabama, is one of the two founding fathers of empirical research on the agenda-setting function of the press. McCombs and his longtime research partner, Donald L. Shaw, first tested the hypothesis that the news media have a major influence on which issues the public considers important in the 1968 U.S. presidential election while they worked together as young professors of journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The article that resulted from that study, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” which appeared in the summer 1972 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, has become a classic and perhaps the most cited article in the field of mass communication research in the past 35 years. Since then, there have been hundreds of studies of agenda setting, many of which are described in McCombs'latest book, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (2004).

After earning his bachelor's degree from Tulane University in 1960, McCombs enrolled in Stanford University's master's program, which he completed in 1961, and then returned to New Orleans, where he worked as a reporter for the New Orleans TimesPicayune until 1963. He then enrolled in Stanford's doctoral program in communication, which he finished in 1966. He took a position as an assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he had been lecturing since 1965, and stayed until 1967. He moved to the University of North Carolina, where he and Donald Shaw began their 40-year research collaboration. He left North Carolina for the John Ben Snow Professorship at Syracuse University in 1973, and in 1985 he accepted his current position as the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Highlights of McCombs' career include serving as director of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) News Research Center from 1975 to 1984, chairing the Department of Journalism at the University of Texas from 1985 to 1991, spending a decade as a visiting professor at the University of Navarra in Spain from 1994 to 2004, and serving as the president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) from 1997 to 1998. His honors include the Sidney S. Goldish Award for a significant, continuing contribution to newspaper research from the International Newspaper Promotion Association in 1978, a fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University in 1990, a fellowship in the International Communication Association in 1995, the Murray Edelman Career Award for distinguished scholarship in political communication (with Donald Shaw) from the American Political Science Association in 1996, and the Paul J. Deutschmann Award for excellence in research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 1998.

Throughout his unusually focused and productive research career, McCombs has expanded and elaborated the original agenda-setting hypothesis into a rich [Page 426]and complex theory not only of media influence on the public but also of its influences on the media agenda. This theory is one of few that have been developed solely within the communication field.

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