this sunday Maxwell McCombs has diedformer teacher of Faculty of Communication of the University of Navarra since 1994 and one of the two pioneers, with Donald L. Shaw, of the theory of agenda setting, research which demonstrates the degree of influence of media in public opinion, depending on the media coverage given to a news item.
MacCombs was born in 1938 in Birmingham, Alabama (USA). He received a degree in journalism from Tulane University in New Orleans (1960) and a master’s degree from Stanford University. He returned to New Orleans and worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune until 1963. He enrolled in Stanford’s doctoral program in communications, which he completed in 1966. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until 1963. 1967 and then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he and Shaw began their 40-year research collaboration.
He left North Carolina for Syracuse University in New York in 1973. From 1975 to 1984, he was director of the News Research Center of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. In 1985, he became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he chaired the Department of journalism between 1985 and 1991. From 1997 to 1998 he was President of the World Association for Public Opinion Research.
At study the role of the media in presidential elections In 1968, McCombs and his longtime research partner Donald L. Shaw, both professors of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, were the first to test and confirm the hypothesis that the media have a great influence on the American economy and on issues that the public considers important.
McCombs and Shaw showed that the public often judges the importance of a news based on the frequency and prominence with which it is covered by the media, which indicates the extent to which the media shapes public opinion. The article resulting from this study, “The Agenda-Setting Function of the Media,” published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972, is perhaps the most cited article in the field of mass communication researchSince then, hundreds of studies have been conducted on agenda setting, many of which were described in McCombs’ book, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (2004).
Silver Medal of the University of Navarre
He was the Jesse H. Jones Professor in the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Communication of the University of Navarra since 1994. He taught for many years in the doctoral program. With his wife Betsy and children Max and Sam, he spent time in Pamplona, a city that the family considered their second home. During these stays, in addition to teaching, he worked with Esteban López-Escobar and other professors in the Department of Public Communication on publications that formulated the second dimension of agenda-setting. In 2014, he was awarded the university’s silver medal.
Manuel Martín Algarra, professor at the Faculty of Communicationremember: “Max McCombs was a world-renowned communications specialistbut above all he was a close and generous colleague, ready to help as much as possible for whatever the Faculty asked of him. Many of us benefited from this generosity. Rest in peace.”
In addition, Esteban López-Escobar, professor emeritus of the Facultyhe emphasizes, in addition to his teaching qualities and his great intellectual work, his personality. “Was an extraordinarily generous manwhile generosity is precisely one of the most beautiful university virtues. He was also hospitable, the doors of his house in Austin were always open to anyone who came from Pamplona. For us it is a great pain, there were decades of very fruitful intellectual relationships, “he concludes.
