Donald Lewis Shaw (October 27, 1936 – October 19, 2021), one of the two founding fathers of empirical research on the agenda-setting function of the press, was a social scientist and a Kenan professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[2] Shaw is best known for his work, with Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas, on the agenda-setting theory and for his studies of 19th and 20th century American and Southern press history.

[3] During the 1968 presidential election, Shaw and McCombs collected survey data from a random group of Chapel Hill residents.

[5] In 1977, Shaw and McCombs published The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agenda-Setting Function of the Press,[6] which the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly listed as one of the top 35 "significant journalism and communication books" of the 20th century.

[7] In 1999, Shaw and his colleagues published the first study of audience agendamelding,[8] the process by which individuals mix messages to create personal images of community.