Maxwell McCombs, co-author of the theory on how the media influences the public’s consideration of relevant issues

On September 8, Maxwell E. McCombs died at his home in Austin, Texas. He confirmed for the first time, along with Donald Shaw, that the media has a great influence on what issues the public considers important. the effect agenda-setting.

McCombs was born in 1938 in Birmingham, Alabama. From a young age he felt drawn to journalism. He was editor of the The Hullaballoo from Tulane University, where he graduated in 1960. He then moved to Stanford to pursue his master’s degree. From 1961, he was an editor at the Times-Picayune from New Orleans. His mentor at Stanford, Wilbur Schramm, would eventually convince him to join the doctoral program two years later.

Schramm turned out to be the key person in helping the journalist become an academic. He had founded the Stanford Institute for Communication Research in 1955, a leading center in the field. The 1960s were a time of uncertainty in the field. After its enormous boost in World War II, doubts about its future were beginning to arise. In 1959, the journal Public Opinion Quarterly published a discussion of the state of communication research. According to Bernard Berelson, the vitality of communication was running out. Schramm, in his reply, argued that the young people presenting their PhD theses at Stanford possessed “deep knowledge of psychology, sociology, mathematics, and research methodologies, as well as a profound interest in communication problems.” They were clearly better prepared than anyone fifteen years earlier to do research on communication. Maxwell McCombs would soon be one of them.

At Stanford, McCombs studied communication theory, content analysis, learning theory, and statistics. With this background he earned his PhD in 1966. He spent a year at UCLA and in 1968 became a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There he began his collaboration with Donald Shaw. Based on the ideas of Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion and Cohen’s observation that the press may not usually succeed in telling people what to think, but is astonishingly successful in telling its readers what to think about, the two young professors sought to confirm the effect hypothesis. agenda-setting. They conducted fieldwork in the midst of the 1968 election campaign. They questioned undecided voters in Chapel Hill about the most important issues. At the same time, they analyzed the content of the media used by these citizens to obtain information. The data indicated a highly statistically significant relationship between the emphasis placed by the media on different campaign issues and the voters’ judgments about the prominence and importance of several of these issues. This confirmed that the media had a powerful effect on public opinion and inaugurated a new era in communication research. Schramm, through his gifted student, ultimately emerged victorious from the debate with Berelson.

The article that McCombs and Shaw published, The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media, appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972 and is one of the most cited in the history of communication research.

In 1973 McCombs became the John Ben Snow Professor at Syracuse University and was appointed director of its Communication Research Center. He continued to research to confirm the hypothesis and since 1972 thousands of studies with different nuances have been conducted around the world that confirm the theory of agenda-setting: Elements that are prominent in the media often become prominent in public opinion. These elements can be the themes (first level of the agenda-setting) or attributes of those topics (second level). In 1985, he was appointed chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where he continued to teach and direct research work with numerous collaborators until his death.

I first met McCombs at the 1993 World Association for the Study of Public Opinion (WAPOR) conference. In 1994 he joined the Faculty of Communication at the University of Navarra as a visiting professor. Each spring he, his wife, Betsy, and their young sons, Max and Sam, spent several weeks in Pamplona, ​​which became his second home. For years he taught dozens of PhD students and researched closely with Esteban López-Escobar, young professors and PhD students in the Department of Public Communication. In 2014, he received the Silver Medal of the University of Navarra.

Research in agenda-setting McCombs traveled all over the world. He left behind collaborators and friends in countless countries, and his home in Austin has been open to those of us who have come to visit him. An outstanding media researcher is leaving us, but above all, a friend is leaving us. May he rest in peace.

Manuel Martin Algarra He is a Professor at the Faculty of Communication of the University of Navarra.