Propaganda Didn’t Disappear. It Became Public Relations

Public relations was not invented to inform the public. It was invented to manage them. The discipline that now occupies corner offices in major corporations and sits alongside marketing directors at the strategy table grew directly from the techniques of wartime propaganda, repackaged for peacetime commerce. Understanding that lineage is not just a history lesson. It changes how you think about what PR is actually for.

The transformation from propaganda to public relations happened fast, deliberately, and with considerable sophistication. The people who led it knew exactly what they were doing. And the industry they built still carries those roots in its DNA, whether practitioners acknowledge it or not.

Where Did Public Relations Actually Come From?

The First World War created a problem for democratic governments that had never quite existed at that scale before. You needed millions of people to support a war, to enlist, to buy bonds, to accept rationing, and to sustain morale through years of industrial slaughter. Newspapers alone could not do that work. You needed something more coordinated, more psychological, more systematic.

In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information in 1917, led by journalist George Creel. The CPI, as it became known, was a propaganda operation of remarkable scale. It produced posters, pamphlets, films, and speaking tours. It recruited 75,000 “Four Minute Men” to deliver short pro-war speeches in cinemas, meeting halls, and public spaces across the country. It shaped news coverage, coordinated messaging, and built public sentiment with a level of intentionality that had no peacetime equivalent.

When the war ended, the people who had run those operations did not go home and forget what they had learned. They took the techniques into commerce. They understood, perhaps better than anyone alive at the time, how public opinion was formed, how narratives spread, and how institutions could shape what large groups of people believed. That knowledge was commercially valuable, and they knew it.

Who Was Edward Bernays and Why Does He Matter?

Edward Bernays is the figure who sits at the centre of this story, and he is worth understanding properly rather than just citing. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, a fact he was never shy about mentioning. He had worked on the CPI during the war. After it, he set up what he called a “public relations counsel” practice in New York, and he spent the rest of his career articulating, with unusual candour, exactly what he was doing and why.

His 1928 book, Propaganda, opens with a sentence that most PR professionals would prefer not to quote in client proposals: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” He went on to describe the people who perform this manipulation as an “invisible government” that is the true ruling power of the country.

Later, in Crystallizing Public Opinion and in his work with clients including Procter and Gamble, the American Tobacco Company, and the United Fruit Company, Bernays refined the methods. He did not simply place stories. He created events, manufactured contexts, and mobilised third parties to deliver messages that appeared independent but were carefully orchestrated. When he wanted to increase cigarette sales among women in the 1920s, he did not run advertisements. He arranged for women to smoke in the Easter Sunday parade in New York, briefed journalists in advance, and framed the cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” symbols of female emancipation. The coverage was enormous. The sales impact was real.

That campaign is worth sitting with for a moment. It was not journalism. It was not advertising. It was the construction of a media event designed to change behaviour by changing the cultural meaning of a product. That is what Bernays meant by the engineering of consent, and it remains recognisable in contemporary PR practice, even when the methods are more sophisticated and the causes are less troubling than selling cigarettes.

If you are interested in the broader landscape of PR strategy and how the discipline has developed, the PR and Communications hub at The Marketing Juice covers the full range, from measurement frameworks to modern media relations.

Why Did the Industry Rebrand Propaganda as Public Relations?

The word propaganda was not always pejorative. It derives from the Latin “congregatio de propaganda fide,” the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a Vatican body established in the seventeenth century to spread Catholicism in non-Christian territories. For most of its history, propaganda simply meant the organised spreading of a doctrine or cause.

The First World War changed that. By 1918, propaganda had acquired associations with manipulation, deception, and the suspension of individual judgement. The word itself had become a liability. When the Second World War arrived and the full horror of Nazi propaganda became visible to the world, those associations calcified permanently. Propaganda was what the enemy did. It was coercive, dishonest, and totalitarian.

Public relations, by contrast, sounded civic. It implied a relationship, a two-way exchange, a concern for the public interest. The terminology was doing significant work. It was distinguishing the same set of techniques from a concept that had become politically toxic, and repositioning them as something professional, ethical, and compatible with democratic values.

I have spent twenty years in agency environments, and I can tell you that rebranding a practice without changing its substance is something the marketing industry does with considerable regularity. We called it “native advertising” when we meant advertorial. We called it “content marketing” when we meant branded publishing. The nomenclature shifts, the underlying mechanics do not always follow. The propaganda-to-PR transition was the original version of this pattern, executed at a civilisational scale.

What Did the Professionalisation of PR Actually Change?

To be fair to the discipline, professionalisation did change things, not just the name. The formation of the Public Relations Society of America in 1947, the development of codes of ethics, the emergence of academic PR programmes, and the gradual integration of PR into corporate governance structures all represented genuine attempts to build a profession with standards, not just a set of techniques for hire.

The best of that work moved PR toward something genuinely different from propaganda. It introduced the idea that organisations have obligations to their publics, not just interests in managing them. It created frameworks for thinking about stakeholder relationships, reputation over time, and the long-term consequences of communication choices. These are not trivial contributions.

But the tension never fully resolved. The commercial pressures on PR practitioners, whether in-house or in agencies, have always pushed toward the Bernays model rather than away from it. Clients want coverage, not dialogue. They want sentiment managed, not earned. They want third-party endorsement that looks independent but is carefully arranged. The infrastructure of modern PR, the media briefing, the press release, the analyst relationship, the influencer partnership, is still fundamentally about shaping perception rather than informing it.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, which gives you a particular view of what organisations claim their communications achieved versus what the evidence actually shows. The gap between the two is instructive. PR entries would often describe massive earned media campaigns as evidence of public engagement, when what they had actually achieved was a short spike in coverage that left no measurable trace in brand metrics or commercial outcomes. The language of public benefit was doing a lot of heavy lifting over a fairly thin commercial reality.

How Does This History Show Up in Modern PR Practice?

How Does This History Show Up in Modern PR Practice?

The Bernays playbook is not historical. It is operational. Consider the contemporary practice of “earned media,” which involves placing stories with journalists in ways that appear organic but are carefully managed. Consider the use of think tanks, academics, and industry bodies to provide third-party validation for positions that serve a client’s commercial interests. Consider the architecture of a product launch, which creates an event, generates coverage, and frames a narrative in ways that look like news but are constructed communications.

None of this is automatically dishonest. A product launch can be genuinely newsworthy. A think tank can produce genuinely independent research that happens to support a client’s position. A media briefing can provide journalists with accurate information they would not otherwise have. The techniques are not inherently manipulative. But they exist on a spectrum, and the commercial incentives in the industry consistently push practitioners toward the manipulative end of it.

The rise of digital media has complicated this further. Social media platforms have created new channels for the kind of coordinated narrative-building that Bernays pioneered, but at a speed and scale he could not have imagined. Influencer marketing, astroturfing, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and the strategic amplification of particular voices are all recognisable descendants of the CPI’s Four Minute Men, updated for algorithmic distribution.

When I was running an agency and managing significant media budgets across multiple markets, the question of where legitimate communications ended and manufactured consent began came up more often than most agency leaders would admit publicly. A client wants a favourable story placed. The story is broadly accurate but selectively framed. A journalist is briefed with information that is true but incomplete. The resulting coverage looks independent. Is that PR or propaganda? The honest answer is that it depends on the degree of omission, and the industry does not have a clean line to draw.

What Does This Mean for How You Should Think About PR?

Understanding the propaganda origins of PR does not mean dismissing the discipline. It means being clear-eyed about what it is and what it is not. PR is a persuasion function. It exists to shape how audiences perceive an organisation, a product, or a cause. That is legitimate work when the underlying reality is worth communicating and the communication is honest. It is something else when the technique is used to obscure, mislead, or manufacture consent for things that would not survive scrutiny.

The best PR practitioners I have worked with over the years understood this distinction intuitively. They were not naive about what they were doing, but they held a line on the honesty of it. They would push back on clients who wanted to use PR to manage a crisis that required a genuine operational response rather than a communications one. They understood that reputation is a function of behaviour over time, not of messaging in the short term.

The worst PR practitioners I encountered were essentially Bernays without the intellectual honesty. They used the language of “storytelling” and “authentic communication” while constructing narratives that were carefully engineered to serve client interests at the expense of public understanding. They measured success in column inches and sentiment scores while the underlying reality they were being paid to manage remained unchanged.

For anyone building or commissioning PR programmes, the question worth asking is not “what do we want people to believe?” but “what do we want people to know, and is it true?” Those sound like the same question. They are not. The first is the Bernays question. The second is the one that builds durable reputation rather than managed perception.

For a broader perspective on how PR sits within modern communications strategy, including measurement and planning frameworks, the PR and Communications section of The Marketing Juice is worth working through in full.

Has the Industry Reckoned With Its Own History?

Partially, and with varying degrees of honesty depending on who you ask. The academic literature on PR history is reasonably candid about the Bernays connection and the propaganda lineage. Practitioners are less so. The professional associations have developed ethics codes that explicitly distance the discipline from manipulation, but the commercial model of PR, which rewards coverage volume, sentiment management, and narrative control, does not always align with those stated values.

There have been genuine attempts at reform. The shift toward measurement frameworks that focus on outcomes rather than outputs, the growing emphasis on stakeholder engagement rather than one-way messaging, and the increasing scrutiny of influencer disclosure and transparency requirements all represent movements in the right direction. But they are movements against a strong current, not with it.

The honest position is that public relations is a discipline with a genuinely useful function, a complicated history, and a persistent tension between its stated values and its commercial incentives. That is not unique to PR. The same could be said of advertising, of financial services, of journalism itself. But PR is unusual in that its founding figures were so explicit about the manipulative intent, and the industry has spent nearly a century trying to put distance between itself and that candour.

Bernays, to his credit, never pretended otherwise. He thought the engineering of consent was not just legitimate but necessary for a functioning modern society. You do not have to agree with that view to find it clarifying. It tells you what the discipline was built to do, and it helps you think clearly about when it is being used well and when it is not.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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