Maxwell McCombs
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Stanford University
Maxwell McCombs | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 3, 1938 Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. |
| Died | September 8, 2024 (aged 85) Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Education | Tulane University Stanford University |
| Known for | Agenda setting theory |
| Awards | (with Donald Lewis Shaw) Helen Dinerman Award from the World Association for Public Opinion Research (2011) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Communication studies Journalism Political communication |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Syracuse University University of Texas at Austin |
| Thesis | Role of Television in the Acquisition of Language (1966) |
| Doctoral students | King Pu-tsung |
Maxwell E. McCombs (December 3, 1938 – September 8, 2024) was an American journalism scholar known for his work on political communication. He was the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.[1] He is particularly known for developing the agenda setting theory of mass media with Donald Lewis Shaw.
In a 1972 paper, McCombs and Shaw described the results of a study they conducted testing the hypothesis that the news media have a large influence on the issues that the American public considers important. They conducted the study while they were both working at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The resulting paper, "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media", has since been described as "a classic and perhaps the most cited article in the field of mass communication research in the past 35 years."[2]
McCombs has been described as, along with Shaw, "one of the two founding fathers of empirical research on the agenda-setting function of the press."[3]
McCombs was born to his father Max McCombs and his mother Gertrude McCombs[4] on December 3, 1938, in Birmingham, Alabama.[5] In terms of his socioeconomic background his father worked as a supervisor at an iron production plant and his mother was a registrar at a public school in Birmingham.[6] He grew up in a traditional middle class home. McCombs died at the age of 85 in Austin, Texas on September 4, 2024.[7]
