McCombs is the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair Emeritus in the School of Journalism. His long-time research colleague and friend, Donald Shaw, is Kenan Professor Emeritus in the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The seminal study of the agenda-setting role of the news media was conducted in Chapel Hill during the 1968 U.S. presidential election. At the time, both McCombs and Shaw were assistant professors on the journalism faculty at Chapel Hill.

The text of the WAPOR award states that “the study of agenda-setting has flourished over the past four decades in large part due to the research and mentorship of McCombs and Shaw. They have moved the concept of agenda-setting away from the broad effects of the quantity of media coverage to the more nuanced effects of the quantity and nature of media coverage.”

“Indeed, studies of agenda-setting reflect a paradigm shift in how we think about media and public opinion. When Walter Lippmann, nearly a century ago, referred to the “pictures in our heads,” he could not have envisioned a body of scholarship that would describe and explicate our understanding of a highly complex process of media effects on public opinion.”

Established in 1981, this award by WAPOR honors sociologist Helen Dinerman's scientific achievements over three decades of public opinion research.

Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair Emeritus in the School of Journalism Maxwell McCombs and Michael Traugott, former president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research, at the Dinerman Award ceremony in Amsterdam.