Person
Donald Shaw
Founder of agenda-setting research with Maxwell McCombs; professor of journalism and press historian at Chapel Hill (d. 2021).
Biography
Donald Shaw is the communication scholar regarded, together with Maxwell McCombs, as a founder of agenda-setting research. He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (bachelor’s 1959, master’s 1960) and in 1966 began teaching at that university’s school of journalism; McCombs joined the faculty a year later. He worked there as a faculty member until 2012; he is known by the title Kenan Professor Emeritus.
In the 1968 election the two colleagues interviewed a hundred undecided voters in Chapel Hill and measured media content; the result was the 1972 article “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media”. According to his close colleague David Weaver, McCombs was orderly and focused, while Shaw was creative and wide-ranging in his interests.
Shaw was not only an agenda-setting researcher. He worked on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and Southern press history; in the 1960s he did research on the telegraph and news bias. In 1992, with Shannon Martin, he addressed the function of agenda-setting for societies and related the theory to different political systems. In his later period he worked on the concept of “agendamelding”: this approach, which studies how people adopt and blend different agendas according to their group identities, complements the media-effects tradition with a uses-and-gratifications view.
He died in 2021. The lifetime achievement award of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the “Shaw Senior Scholar Award”, bears his name.
In this course
In the Agenda-Setting lesson he appears as McCombs’s colleague and co-author of the Chapel Hill study.
Key works
- McCombs, Maxwell E.; Shaw, Donald L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176-187. https://doi.org/10.1086/267990 — The Chapel Hill study: the article that started agenda-setting theory.
- McCombs, Maxwell E.; Shaw, Donald L.; Weaver, David H. (2014). New directions in agenda-setting theory and research. Mass Communication and Society, 17(6), 781-802. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2014.964871 — The seven aspects of the theory; agendamelding is also covered here.