Page 96 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP
McCOMBS, MAXWELL (1938- ) was coauthor with Donald Shaw of the
first agenda-setting study, done in the 1968 presidential election. When it was
reported in Public Opinion Quarterly, the study sparked interest in the concept
of agenda setting, and more than 200 agenda-setting studies have since been
done. The basic concept is that the media do not tell people what to think; they
tell them what to think about. Correlation between the media agenda and the
public agenda has been well demonstrated, but causation has not.
A graduate of Tulane, McCombs received his Ph.D. from Stanford and taught
a year at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) before going to
North Carolina, where he and Shaw did the first agenda-setting study. He then
went to Syracuse as the Jon Ben Snow Professor of Research and also headed
the American Newspaper Publishers' Association News Research Center. The
center funded and published studies of newspapers, many of them dealing with
political topics. From there he went to Texas as chair of the Department of
Journalism in 1985. (See also Agenda Setting.)
SOURCE: William David Sloan, ed., Makers of the Media Mind, 1990.
Guido H. Stempel HI

McGINNISS, JOE (1942- ). At age 25, this Philadelphia Inquirer reporter
convinced the advertising agency molding presidential candidate Richard
Nixon's television image to give him inside access for a book on the process.
He did not reveal he was a card-carrying Democrat and had been rebuffed in
an earlier approach to the Humphrey camp. The result was a No. 1 bestseller,
The Selling of the President, 1968, which was hardly flattering of the winner.
In 1976, McGinniss wrote Heroes, a personal memoir of his disappointment in
meeting various political figures, including George McGovern, who labeled the
account "full of inaccurate and fabricated quotations." In 1993, McGinniss
wrote The Last Brother, a biography of Senator Edward Kennedy, who had
refused to cooperate with the project. The book drew criticism not only for its
invented dialogue and "ruminations" for its subject but also from the allegations
of plagiarism from other writers. To his credit, in 1995 McGinniss returned a
$1.75 million advance for a book on the O. J. Simpson trial because he said he
felt he could add nothing to the story. Author of several other fiction and non-
fiction books and a professor of literature at Colgate, McGinniss has come to
symbolize to some the excesses of the "new journalism."
SOURCE: Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990.
Marc Edge

THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP, a television political talk show on the air since
1982, broke from the tradition of somber political analysis and instead had
journalists as panelists engage in shouting matches, banter, insults, and on-the-
air chaos. The program's popularity and ratings success spawned a series of
spin-offs, including CNN's Capital Gang and Crossfire. Host John McLaughlin