Person
Maxwell McCombs
One of the two founders of agenda-setting research; did the 1968 Chapel Hill study with Donald Shaw and developed need for orientation and second-level agenda-setting.
Biography
Maxwell McCombs is one of the two founders of agenda-setting research. He was born in 1938; he did his undergraduate degree at Tulane University, and his master’s degree and his doctorate, completed in 1966, at Stanford University. Before moving into academia he had worked as a reporter at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
His career took him in turn to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (from 1967), Syracuse University and, from 1985, the University of Texas at Austin. The study he did in Chapel Hill with his colleague Donald Shaw on the 1968 US presidential election became the starting point of agenda-setting theory through the article “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media”, published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972.
During his years at Syracuse he also directed the news research center of the American Newspaper Publishers Association; that is, he pursued his research side by side with the journalism industry.
In later years McCombs turned the theory from a single finding into a research programme. With his doctoral student David Weaver he developed the concept of “need for orientation”; in the 1990s, with his team, he tested second-level agenda-setting, the idea that not only issues but also attributes are transferred; and he contributed to work taking up new directions such as network agenda-setting and agendamelding. His book Setting the Agenda went through several editions; he wrote the third edition with Sebastian Valenzuela. In 2014, as the theory approached fifty years, he published, with Shaw and Weaver, an essay summarising seven distinct aspects of the theory.
At the University of Texas he held the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair, and he was a visiting professor at universities in countries such as Chile, Austria and Spain. He died in 2024 at the age of eighty-five.
In this course
The main hero of the Agenda-Setting lesson: the Chapel Hill study and need for orientation. He appears again, with second-level agenda-setting, in the Priming and Second-Level Agenda-Setting lesson.
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. (1976). Agenda-setting research: A bibliographic essay. Syracuse, NY: Communication Research Center, S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, Syracuse University (ERIC document ED 132 575). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED132575.pdf — A review of the early research written by McCombs himself (Charlotte, time lag, three models).
- Roberts, Marilyn; McCombs, Maxwell (1994). Agenda setting and political advertising: Origins of the news agenda. Political Communication, 11(3), 249-262. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.1994.9963030 — Intermedia agenda-setting and the role of political ads.
- McCombs, Maxwell; Llamas, Juan Pablo; Lopez-Escobar, Esteban; Rey, Federico (1997). Candidate images in Spanish elections: Second-level agenda-setting effects. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 74(4), 703-717. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909707400404 — Second-level agenda-setting in the Spanish elections.
- 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 — An essay gathering the seven aspects of the theory and the concepts of need for orientation, network agenda-setting and agendamelding.