The evolution of agenda-setting research and theory from 1972 to 2025: from newspapers and TV to social media and artificial intelligence

My sincere thanks to Professors Lei Guo and Christopher Vargo for arranging this special issue of Communication and Change, "Revisiting Agenda-Setting Theory in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, " and to all those who have contributed to it.As someone who has been associated with agenda-setting research-and has worked with the two founders of it, Professors Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw-for more than 50 years, I'm pleased to contribute my thoughts and experiences about its origins and development during this past half-century.I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1971, where McCombs and Shaw were young associate professors of journalism, after the first 1968 agenda-setting study and before the second one in 1972 and the publication of the original agenda-setting article in Public Opinion Quarterly (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).I was lucky as a first-year doctoral student to be involved in the planning of the 1972 threewave Charlotte, NC, panel study and the analysis of the data from that study thanks to an invitation from Max McCombs.That resulted in our 1973 ICA paper on need for orientation, presented in