Social Scientist to Appear at Quinnipiac University

HAMDEN, CT – Donald Shaw, a social scientist and one of the founding fathers of the agenda-setting theory in mass communication, will present the lecture, “Public Agendas, Private Choices: Media Agenda Setting and Audience Agendamelding,” at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 17, in the Mount Carmel Auditorium at Quinnipiac University, 275 Mount Carmel Ave.

“Donald Shaw is one of the top mass communication researchers of the past 50 years, and his agenda-setting theory set the stage for a new wave of research across our fields,” said Chris Roush, dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac.

Shaw, a retired University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor, began work on the agenda-setting theory in 1966. He was joined by Maxwell McCombs in 1967, when McCombs came to the University of North Carolina as a junior professor. During the 1968 presidential election, they collected survey data from a random group of Chapel Hill residents.

McCombs and Shaw demonstrated that audiences often judge the importance of a news item based on how frequently and prominently it is covered by the media, thus indicating the degree to which the media shapes public opinion. McCombs and Shaw's seminal article, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” is arguably the most-cited work in the field of mass communication research.

Shaw is a retired U.S. Army officer and has a doctorate in journalism from the University of Wisconsin. He also has a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from North Carolina. He is the author of multiple publications, including, “The Rise and Fall of American Mass Media: Roles of Technology and Leadership,” “Content is King: News Media Management in the Digital Age” and most recently, “Agendamelding: News, Social Media, Audiences and Civic Community.”

This talk, which is part of the dean of the School of Communications’ speaker series, is free and open to the public. For more information, call 203-582-8652.