Maxwell McCombs

Bio: Maxwell McCombs is an academic researcher from University of Texas at Austin. The author has contributed to research in topics: Public opinion & Agenda-setting theory. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 3 publications receiving 8360 citations.

The agenda-setting function of mass media

Abstract: In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues—that is, the media may jet the "agenda" of the campaign. The authors are associate professors of journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Framing as a theory of media effects

Abstract: Research on framing is characterized by theoretical and empirical vagueness. This is due, in part, to the lack of a commonly shared theoretical model underlying framing research. Conceptual problems translate into operational problems, limiting the comparability of instruments and results. In this paper I systematize the fragmented approaches to framing in political communication and integrate them into a comprehensive model. I classify previous approaches to framing research along two dimensions: the type of frame examined (media frames vs. audience frames) and the way frames are operationalized (independent variable or dependent variable). I develop a process model of framing, identifying four key processes that should be addressed in future research: frame building, frame setting, individual-level processes of framing, and a feedback loop from audiences to journalists.

Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models

Abstract: This special issue of Journal of Communication is devoted to theoretical explanations of news framing, agenda setting, and priming effects. It examines if and how the three models are related and what potential relationships between them tell theorists and researchers about the effects of mass media. As an introduction to this effort, this essay provides a very brief review of the three effects and their roots in media-effects research. Based on this overview, we highlight a few key dimensions along which one can compare, framing, agenda setting, and priming. We conclude with a description of the contexts within which the three models operate, and the broader implications that these conceptual distinctions have for the growth of our discipline. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00326.x In 1997, Republican pollster Frank Luntz sent out a 222-page memo called ‘‘Language of the 21st century’’ to select members of the U.S. Congress. Parts of the memo soon spread among staffers, members of Congress, and also journalists. Luntz’s message was simple: ‘‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it’’ (Luntz, in press). Drawing on various techniques for real-time message testing and focus grouping, Frank Luntz had researched Republican campaign messages and distilled terms and phrases that resonated with specific interpretive schemas among audiences and therefore helped shift people’s attitudes. In other words, the effect of the messages was not a function of content differences but of differences in the modes of presentation. The ideas outlined in the memo were hardly new, of course, and drew on decades of existing research in sociology (Goffman, 1974), economics (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), psychology (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, 2004), and communication (Entman, 1991; Iyengar, 1991). But Frank Luntz was the first professional pollster to systematically use the concept of framing as a campaign tool. The Democratic Party soon followed and George Lakoff published Don’t Think of an

Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content

Abstract: Studying influences on media content beyond processes and effects analyzing media content patterns of media content influences on content from individual media workers influence of media routines organizational influences on content influences on content from outside of media organizations the influence of ideology linking influences on content to the effects of content building a theory of news content.

6. Katz, E. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications

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