During WWI [0], and even WWII plenty of countries would openly run propaganda ministries distributing government news.
Which most people considered legitimate news, as new information from afar was not very easy to come by back then.
After WWII a lot of Nazi crimes were blamed on the efficiency of "Goebbels propaganda", so the term became stigmatized. Which put people like Edward Bernays [1], who had been working in the propaganda business for decades and literally wrote the book on it, in a bit of pickle.
So he came up with the rebranding of "Public Relations", which is basically privatized propaganda. Turning it from something strictly governments do, to a service that can be bought by anyone with enough money.
Thank you, this is thoughtful and considered. It took me a bit to understand exactly where it goes off kilter.
It's at "basically", namely "_basically_ privatized propaganda"
I see evidence someone did something that's defined as for the politics for the government during a war, then did similar work in private industry as not illuminating.
This is in fact expected. A quartermaster who now does logistics doesn't mean logistics is just a polite rebranding of supplying weapons
We also agree it is not evidence of a conscious rebranding of an entire field away from being named "propaganda" to "public relations"
