Interesting. I studied propaganda academically (communicology studies) and would have argued it's gotten worse in the last 20 years, due to new technologies. That is not a strong opinion of mine and your post made me think. I'd like to better understand your point. Are you US American? Are you talking about cold-war propaganda as having being worse or the post 911 hysteria?

American here, it has vastly eroded in the past two decades among the younger generations.

Be aware I am leading you on, but would you say that was more due to the spread of alternative ideas on social media (on covid and lockdowns, gender politics, race politics, geopolitics), distrust in the political system (politicians not being true to what they promised during campaign time) or something completely different?

I'd say it's largely due to the coming of age during the Internet era where there is much more visibility into the thoughts and inner workings of our political leaders and public institutions.

Plus some notable milestones:

2001 Patriot Act - very unpatriotic and anti-american

2008 mortgage crisis - huge bailouts for large corps, nothing for regular joes

2016 election of Trump - reality TV president, collapse of "norms"

2020+ covid response - unprepared and poorly handled, contradictions and backpedaling abound

Probably lots more I'm omitting but it's much harder to make the case we're #1 these days without adding caveats and qualifiers.

I'm an American.

There's many metrics for measuring this. Frequency of international travel is up for Americans, even normalized for immigration.

The consumption of foreign media such as anime kpop and bollywood films is up.

Classic white Americans have also become more multilingual and their cuisine choices have diversified.

It's not great but it's up from a baseline of terrible where people would be asked to point to England on a map and then point to, say, Japan or shown some Hangul text and think it's Farsi. They're not quite that awful anymore.

I'm familiar with the PISA study as being an objective measurement for what you're describing. If I remember correctly the US scored somewhere in the middle of the field, just above Croatia (technically a 3rd world country, as when it was part of Yugoslavia it was also part of the Non-aligned movement during the cold war or 3rd world. The phrase was later turned into a derogatory term by some pretty crafty spin doctors).

I remember the US getting constantly humiliated on the study and stopped taking it. I also remember it being a big thing here in the EU. Pretty much all national TV channels were covering their respective scores.

That was some time ago and I do believe you might be right and that things have improved dramatically. However how does one track this now-a-days? I tried the PISA website, but it seems to have been mostly discontinued, as the last published survey seems to be from 2018. So I'm basically looking for a source that compares education objectively by country with recent data.