Maxwell McCombs

Maxwell McCombs (born 1938, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.) is one of the two founding fathers of empirical research on the agenda-setting function of the press. Studying the role of mass media in the 1968 U.S. presidential election, McCombs and his longtime research partner, Donald L. Shaw, both professors of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first tested and confirmed the hypothesis that the news media have a major influence on which issues the public considers important. McCombs and Shaw demonstrated that audiences often judge the importance of a news item based on how frequently and prominently it is covered by the media, thus indicating the degree to which the media shapes public opinion. The article that resulted from that study, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972 and is perhaps the most-cited article in the field of mass communication research. Since then there have been hundreds of studies of agenda setting, many of which were described in McCombs’s book, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (2004).

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1960, McCombs enrolled in Stanford University’s master’s program, which he completed in 1961. He returned to New Orleans and worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune until 1963. He enrolled in Stanford’s doctoral program in communication, which he finished in 1966. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1967 and then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he and Shaw began their 40-year research collaboration. He left North Carolina for Syracuse University in New York in 1973. From 1975 to 1984 he served as director of the American Newspaper Publishers Association News Research Center. He became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985, where he chaired the journalism department from 1985 to 1991. Since 1994 he was also a visiting professor at the University of Navarra in Spain. From 1997 to 1998 he was president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research.