The creation of the term "Public Relations" is an example of skillful propaganda.

I am not "HN", just one human, one mind (more or less).

Communication is what we are doing here.

When you propagate a message to many people, then it's propaganda.

Once upon a time the word had no negative sense. Then it did, so they changed the job to PR.

Source?

Mainly because of Goebbels and co:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Ministry_of_Public_Enl...

"At the time the German word ‘Propaganda’ was value neutral."

English "propaganda" sounds the same .. and therefore got the negative connotation as well.

This

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsehood_in_War-Time

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

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"

If the government does it its propaganda. I don't see how that's dated. Unless you count misuse of the term as valid. People misuse propaganda to mean media describing a narrative they don't like all the time. But those people are wrong and shouldn't be encouraged.

Third parties working on behalf of a government to spread their message do count as Propaganda.

The difficult part is telling apart propaganda from organic content. People have this idea of propaganda being a bunch of communists making posters with slogans or something. But that is what's really dated. How do you know a group isn't being funded by a government or affiliated with them? Sometimes its easy to tell. Like with Russia Today. They have the veneer of a news outlet but they are state owned. But when a lot of people get their news from social media its impossible to know who is really on the other side.