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]
Background
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]
An article by the University of Texas Moody College of Communication notes that: The concept of network agenda-setting is attributed to McCombs work in his later years. Network agenda-setting is the continuation of agenda-setting theory. This theory explores media networks and how they are broadcast to the public in terms of the issues they report on and the linkage from one issue to another. Net-works shy away from isolated topics. In McComb’s works he discusses “Organizing the extensive literature on agenda setting into six ongoing phases of research that detail the formation of public opinion, this book has been described as the Gray's Anatomy of agenda-setting theory.”[8]
References
12"Max McCombs". School of Journalism. University of Texas at Austin. January 11, 2017. Retrieved September 14, 2019.
