By Emily DeMotte*
A group of journalism scholars paid tribute to late scholar and UT Professor Max McCombs Friday, March 28, with an engaging reflection on the role of agenda-setting in online journalism.
The research breakfast kicked off the second day of the 26th annual International Symposium on Online Journalism and honored McCombs’ role in the internationally-recognized theory on the agenda-setting role of media, which proposes that media can shape public opinion by determining which issues are given the most attention.
The discussion was led by Sebastián Valenzuela, a UT alumnus and associate professor at Pontifical Catholic University in Chile, who began the session with a nod to McCombs’ legacy as both a scholar and colleague. As a former mentee and colleague of McCombs, Valenzuela said his memory lives on not only through his pioneering research but also through the “countless students he mentored, the colleagues he inspired and the institutions he helped across the world.”
“He was, in every sense, a true gentleman of our field today,” Valenzuela said. “As we continue exploring the questions that matter to him, we do so in gratitude and remembrance. Let us carry forward his spirit of inquiry and his belief in the power of ideas to shape the world.”
While McCombs’ research theory is sometimes classified as a “minimal effect” because it proposes that the media affect not what we think, but only what we think about, his impact was quite the opposite, said Talia Stroud, a UT professor and director of the Center for Media Engagement who was a former colleague of the scholar.
“Just like his theory, Max’s humble and kind mannerisms are not minimal at all,” Stroud said. “He had a massive effect on me, on his colleagues and students and on the field as a whole.”
UT professor Tom Johnson also doted on McCombs’ kind character, recalling their bi-weekly lunches where the two would bond over a Coke and a sandwich.
“He was just a true southern gentleman,” Johnson said. “He (was) so unassuming, you would never know he was the founder of a major theory.”
True to his research, McCombs was partial to metaphors, Steve Reese, a UT professor, said, reminiscing on the time the scholar compared his own ideas to the agenda-setting theory.
“You realize how if you have a compelling idea, it can have an impact,” Reese said. “And this idea of agenda (setting) has been paradigmatic and hegemonic.”
In addition to his renowned research, McCombs is also remembered for his Graduate Student Research Publishing Award, which he created in 2006 as an effort to encourage graduate students to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Since then, 79 graduate students in UT’s School of Journalism and Media have received the award, said Paula Poindexter, a UT professor who worked closely with the scholar. Poindexter, who called McCombs her colleague, friend, mentor and dissertation chair, said his guidance often led her to new paths within her career.
“He was a visionary,” she said. “He saw things about me and my future that I did not see.”
The latter half of the session was dedicated to the presentation of ongoing research that reflects upon the agenda-setting ideas McCombs was known for.
A former student of the scholar and current Texas State University professor, Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce, discussed the possibility of consensus building in an age of fragmented media in Latin America as an elaboration of her study, “Digital News Building Consensus in Polarized Insecure Democracies in Argentina, Brazil and Columbia.” In her research, she found that as digital media use by lower and higher education groups in these areas increased, they were brought closer together into consensus.
“What I find is that, perhaps in this age of fragmented media systems and digital media, we need to look into the reasons why people are accessing these (media sources) (and the) contingent conditions into the effects that media might have on people,” De Macedo Higgins Joyce said.
As a graduate student representative, third-year PhD student Zhi Lin also presented her ongoing research, which examines the intersection of global political communication and the social media ecosystem. In her study, “Agenda Setting: The Role of Political Bots in Digital Public Diplomacy on Social Media,” she discussed the ways that political bots can influence public opinion, reflecting McCombs’ agenda-setting research.
“I think the third level of agenda-setting theory resonates with these approaches, because bots make connections with existing authentic trends with fabricated content,” said Lin, a recipient of the McCombs Graduate Publishing Award.
The session concluded with a brief discussion of McCombs’ final research contribution, which explores the idea of a multi-layered network of agendas and will be presented by Valenzuela and his colleagues Lei Guo and Diego Gómez at the 75th annual International Communication Association conference this June.
“We’ve been working with this idea for the past year,” Valenzuela said. “And Max, almost to his last few days with us, would email us with ideas of how we could develop more of these thoughts. After he passed away, we learned the news that the ICA had accepted the first draft of our version of the theory.”
Emily DeMotte is a sophomore journalism student at The University of Texas at Austin. Enjoys long-form and investigative reporting in both print and audio mediums, and is currently the associate projects editor for The Daily Texan and a producer for The Drag Audio.