Maxwell McCombs
Photo by Michael Muller
Professor, Jesse H. Jones Chair in Communications
Contact Information:
CMA A7.246
512-471-8416
maxmccombs@mail.utexas.edu
McCombs is internationally recognized for his research on the agenda-setting role of mass communication. Since the original Chapel Hill study with his colleague Donald Shaw coined the term "agenda setting" in 1968, more than 400 studies of agenda setting have been conducted worldwide. In the continuing evolution of political communication, British scholars Jay G. Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh have commented, "Among the field's master paradigms, agenda setting may be most worth pursuing."
McCombs' most recent book is Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion, published in the fall of 2004 by Polity Press in Cambridge, England. Organizing the vast literature on agenda setting into five ongoing phases of research, this book has been described as the Gray’s Anatomy of agenda-setting theory. He also is the co-author of The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting (2003), Research in Mass Communication (2000) and Contemporary Public Opinion" (1991), which has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Greek.
A past president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research and a fellow of the International Communication Association, McCombs received an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp, the Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and is the co-recipient with Donald Shaw of the Murray Edelman Award of the American Political Science Association for continuing work on agenda setting.
McCombs holds the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and has been a visiting professor annually at the University of Navarra in Spain since 1994. In recent years he also has been a visiting professor at Catholic University and Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile.
McCombs received his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Stanford University and his B.A. from Tulane University. Prior to joining the University of Texas faculty in 1985, he was the John Ben Snow Professor of Research at Syracuse University. McCombs also served for 10 years as director of the News Research Center of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. He has been on the faculties of the University of North Carolina and UCLA and worked as a reporter at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Recent Courses: J381.1 Content Analysis, J382 Agenda Setting, J382 Contemporary Trends in Journalism and J395 Political Communication.