Maxwell McCombs, former professor at School University Communication, dies

Last Sunday, September 8, Maxwell McCombs, former professor of the School of Communication at the University of Navarra since 1994 and one of the two pioneers, along with Donald L. Shaw, of the theory of the diary setting, the research that demonstrates the Degree influence of the media on public opinion, depending on the coverage given to a news item, passed away. 

MacCombs was born in 1938 in Birmingham, Alabama (USA). graduate in Journalism at Tulane University in New Orleans (1960) and Master's Degree by Stanford University. He returned to New Orleans and worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune until 1963. He enrolled at Stanford's doctoral program in communication, which he completed in 1966. He worked as Adjunct Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1967 and then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he and Shaw began their 40-year partnership of research . He left North Carolina for Syracuse University in New York in 1973. From 1975 to 1984 he served as director of the research center News of the association American Newspaper Publishers. In 1985 he became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he directed the department of journalism from 1985 to 1991. From 1997 to 1998 he was president of association World research of Public Opinion.

In studying the role of the media in the 1968 U.S. presidential election, McCombs and his longtime research colleague, 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 major influence on the issues the public considers important. 

McCombs and Shaw demonstrated that audiences tend to judge the importance of a news story based on the frequency and prominence with which the media cover it, indicating the Degree in which the media shape public opinion. The article that emerged from that study, "The diary setting function of the mass media," appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972 and is perhaps the article most cited in the field of research mass communication. Since then, there have been hundreds of programs of study on diary setting, many of which were described in McCombs' book, Setting the diary: The Mass average and Public Opinion (2004).

Silver Medal of the University of Navarra

He was the Jesse H. Jones Professor in the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and Visiting Professor of the School of Communication at the University of Navarra since 1994. He taught at doctoral program for many years. With his wife, Betsy, and sons Max and Sam, he spent time in Pamplona, a city the family considered their second home. During those stays, in addition to the teaching, he worked with Esteban Lopez-Escobar and other department professors from Public Communication on publications that formulated the second dimension of the diary setting. In 2014 he was awarded the Silver Medal of the University.

Manuel Martín Algarra, professor at School of Communication, recalls: "Max McCombs was a world-renowned scholar of communication, but above all he was a close and generous colleague, willing to help in any way possible in whatever was asked of him from School. Many of us have been the beneficiaries of that generosity. May he rest in peace.

For his part, Esteban López-Escobar, Professor Emeritus of the School, points out, apart from his teaching qualities and his great intellectual work , his personality. "He was an extraordinarily generous man, when 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 sorrow, they were decades of very fruitful intellectual relationship", he concludes.