Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 0:02
ICA presents. Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Dr. Max McCombs. Dr McCombs is internationally recognized for developing the theory of agenda-setting by the media, alongside his colleague Donald Shaw. Together they pioneered research on how the media influences the public's attention. Dr. McCombs is currently the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication Emeritus in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. McCombs is also a fellow of the International Communication Association. Today Dr. McCombs is in conversation with Dr. David Weaver. During his career, Dr. Weaver has published 14 books related to media agenda-setting and served as the Distinguished and Roy W. Howard Professor Emeritus at The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. And here is Dr. David Weaver.

David Weaver 1:03
I'm very pleased to be interviewing my mentor, colleague and friend for half a century, Professor Maxwell McCombs, who is now retired from the University of Texas. So Max, you majored in journalism as an undergraduate at Tulane University, you worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and subsequently earned a PhD in communication research at Stanford. What prompted your evolution from journalists to social science researcher?

Max McCombs 1:32
In my senior year at Tulane, one of my professors, Walter Wilcox, met with me and recommended that rather than immediately taking a job on a newspaper, I should go to Stanford and get a master's degree. Three months after graduation, I was on a westbound train headed for Palo Alto, California to enter the master's program there. At that time, Chilton Bush, who was chairman of the Department of Journalism and Communication was also the graduate advisor for all new students. So I set up a meeting with Bush and I'm sitting in the anteroom to his office and he comes storming out of the office, paying no attention to me or the other graduate students who were there, drops a huge pile of file folders on his secretary's desk and exclaims, "These goddamn graduate students are driving me crazy," and he stormed back into his office. About two minutes later, his secretary said "Dr. Bush will see you now." And so I entered his office not being sure what to expect, he motioned me to sit down and immediately said, "Walt," referring to Professor Walter Wilcox, "Walt told me all about you. What you want to take is: Wilbur Schramm's theory course, my content analysis course, go over to the psych department and get a statistics course and while you're there, take a learning theory course." He wrote these four courses on a notepad, tore off the top page, handed it to me and said, "Go home and think about it and come back tomorrow." Those were the courses I enrolled in. As I was finishing up my master's Bush said, "We prefer that our PhD students have professional experience. So, you need to go get a job on a newspaper. And after a few years, come back and finish your PhD and we will support you all the way." My master's degree at Stanford was, in effect, the first year of the Ph. D program. I discovered a wonderful new area of intellectual interest.

David Weaver 3:57
During your time at Stanford, and in the early years of your academic career, were there other influences on your research?

Max McCombs 4:05
There was a kind of double influence by Wilbur Schramm. I did take his theory course and then in my final year in the PhD program, I was Schramm's research assistant. I spent a lot of time one on one with him. He was a man of great vision. And he, of course, is one of the founding fathers of the field of communication. He had many ideas about how the communication field should be structured, what kinds of questions could pursue, etc. And he had fantastic international connections to help make that happen. So there was an intellectual influence there. But there also was a tremendous influence on my writing. Before Schramm really got into communication research, he was a professor at Iowa and founded the Iowa writing workshop, which was a focus on creative writing. He was also a very successful creative writer on his own, publishing a significant number of short stories in Collier's magazine, which was one of the leading magazines of that time. He had a marvelous way of writing research reports that covered all the important details that we as researchers wanted but that could also communicate to the heads of institutions and of foundations and to people who were not researchers. Both his writing and his vision impacted me tremendously. The second influence from the Stanford years is much more broad. At that time, the physics faculty at Stanford and the physics faculty at Berkeley were arguably the two most eminent sets of physicists in the world. The discipline of that area, that people would work on the same question for years and years or pursue the same line of research for years and years, impressed me a great deal. As I look back on my career as a professor, I see that influence very much that I kept after questions related to agenda-setting. The third influence was you and Don. We became good friends and research partners very quickly. The fact that I had two close friends and research partners was also important.

David Weaver 6:30
Could you talk a little bit about the idea of agenda-setting and how you first came to empirically study it? You often refer to Walter Lippman's "pictures in our heads". I'm wondering how that influenced your study of agenda-setting?

Max McCombs 6:44
One of the personal projects I took on when I first went to Stanford was to read Lippman's book "Public Opinion", which is now celebrating its centennial, not many academic books last that long. I was quite fascinated by Lippmann, and in particular by the title of the first chapter in the book, which is an abstract of what agenda-setting is about. The title of the chapter is "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads". It was Lippman's thesis that the news media were the bridge between the two. And I just found that very fascinating. I didn't really do much with it as a graduate student. If we fast forward to my first academic appointment at UCLA, there was a group of junior faculty members who met on Friday afternoon to talk about whatever. One of those Friday afternoons we started talking about a lead story in the Los Angeles Times that week that had to compete with the local story about the war on poverty and the head of the Los Angeles Orange County "war on poverty" being fired. It had to compete with two other stories: one, a budding scandal out of Washington, and the other, surprise outcomes of local council elections in England, which were taken as a forecast of a major shift in the government and the national elections. We talked about what happens to stories if they could have been the lead but they get moved down on the front page, or even inside the paper. It was an interesting bit of speculation. But it stuck with me as a reverse version of agenda-setting that a prominent story may go on to have great influence whereas the stories that get put down, sometimes now referred to as agenda-cutting, in effect, lose out. So, that was a budding idea of agenda-setting. I moved at the end of that year due to what was happening in California. An up-and-coming politician, named Ron, was elected governor and took an axe to the University of California budget. I accepted an offer from North Carolina, moved to Chapel Hill, where I met Don, and a year later we launched what is now known as the Chapel Hill study, testing the idea of agenda-setting.

David Weaver 9:22
Did you and Don consider agenda-setting to be a theory when you first studied it?

Max McCombs 9:28
No, not at all. I thought of The Chapel Hill study as a media effects hypothesis, a new focus for a hypothesis on cognitive effects, rather than what had been up to that point, primarily a focus on attitudes and opinions. But as we moved on beyond the Chapel Hill study our '72 Charlotte study, which was full population, three waves of interviews, was the study where you introduced the concept of "need for orientation". That was the first theoretical expansion of the idea. It became very clear to me that we were beyond a hypothesis at that point, that we had the beginnings of a theory. In the book that we did "The Emergence of American Political Issues", reporting that study, I also wrote a short section raising the question of "attribute agenda-setting", which we now know is the second level. We didn't actually test that idea until the '76 study. At that point, we were into a theory. You, I and Don now had the task of explicating a broader theory.

David Weaver 10:44
What do you consider was needed to develop agenda-setting into a theory?

Max McCombs 10:50
At the core, a theory needs to have a central theme or axiom. For agenda-setting that theme is the transfer of salience from one agenda to another. That, in effect, is the core of the theory. Over the ensuing years, we explicated that theme at three levels of agenda-setting. The first level in the Chapel Hill study, also for the most part the Charlotte study. Then in the Three-Site Study in '76 we introduced the idea and tested it, a second level of agenda-setting, "attribute agenda-setting". More recently, Lei Guo and I developed the third level of agenda-setting, network agenda-setting. That expanded the theory tremendously. The other significant expansion was explicating contingent conditions that strengthen or weaken the agenda-setting effects of the media. We've already talked briefly about "need for orientation, which was a psychological concept explaining how people approached a particular issue, whether they found it relevant, whether they knew much about it, etc. The second contingent condition, "concept of compelling arguments", was introduced by Salma Ghanem, that is certain attributes in the reporting of an issue that particularly resonate with the public. And at present, Raquel Rodriguez in Spain and I are working on expanding a concept introduced by the Spanish sociologist Fermín Bouza, the idea of an impact area where both the personal agenda of an individual and the public agenda, the most important problem for the country reside. Fermín's concept is when those two overlap, and in some cases they overlap perfectly, strong agenda-setting effects will result; where they're going in very different directions, the agenda-setting effects will be very weak. So, those are the elements that have come together to create what we can now call a theory of agenda-setting. And I think the theoretical frontier is wide open.

David Weaver 13:23
What do you see as important issues of agenda-setting research in the future?

Max McCombs 13:28
A major frontier is the expansion of network agenda-setting to create integrated networks of the media agendas of multiple sources. Most of the research at present, in terms of a network analysis of media agenda, involve the media agenda of one news source: the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. But if we approach this in a broader way of integrating those networks, that galaxy of news agendas can detail in much more nuanced and complete ways what the public experiences in the news. I call this the Rubik's Cube problem for a network agenda-setting- that is construction of a three-dimensional macro-network that both preserves the nuances of individual agendas and examines the intermediate agenda-setting influences among the media. Preserving those nuances is important. In a study that Lei Guo and I did of New York Times coverage of the Iraq war, we found that the attribute "weapons of mass destruction" was the third most frequent in the coverage, that is if you looked at it at the second level. But in the network analysis of the New York Times agenda, the centrality of "weapons of mass destruction", that is its location within the network, was not even in the top 10. It existed out on the periphery, more or less isolated and not a central part of the network agenda at all. When we begin to combine the networks of different sources, we need to be able to preserve those nuances, those idiosyncrasies of an individual news source, but also understand how these networks come together to provide pictures in people's heads.

David Weaver 15:36
Thinking about communication research more broadly, what do you see as your legacy to communication research?

Max McCombs 15:44
Agenda-setting theory and the various facets of it, which I've enjoyed working on over the years with you and Don. I think it's important to give credit to a whole host of international scholars that agenda-setting moved fairly quickly from being an American research area to also being a Western European research area and then maybe a decade later to thriving in East Asia, important contributions by scholars in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China. And more recently, South America and the Middle East. So, agenda-setting has become an international research area, with scholars across the world being very active and making contributions. I'm very proud to have been part of that international expansion. The other part of my legacy is pushing this idea of theoretical research. Following the example set for me by the field of physics, continuing to push, expand, raise new questions, and continue to better inform our theoretical view of how the news media have an impact on public opinion.

David Weaver 17:13
Thank you very much, Max, for that interesting perspective on the history of agenda setting.

Ellen Wartella 17:20
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about this episode's host and architect, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description.