Case Study 1.2: Rebranding "Propaganda" as "Public Relations"

How Edward Bernays Renamed an Industry

In 1923, a thirty-two-year-old American publicist named Edward Bernays published a slim volume called Crystallizing Public Opinion. It was the first book to describe the practice of professional public relations, and it named the profession for the first time as a distinct field with its own theory, methods, and practitioners.

Bernays did not invent the practices he described. Press agents had worked for politicians and performers for decades. Businesses had engaged in organized image management for at least as long. What Bernays invented was the intellectual framework — the claim that managing public opinion was not merely a practical craft but a science with theoretical foundations in crowd psychology and social influence. And in doing so, he created a new word to replace the one that had become toxic.

The word he was replacing was "propaganda."

The Problem with the Word

By the early 1920s, "propaganda" was damaged goods. The Committee on Public Information's wartime campaigns had been extensively analyzed, criticized, and denounced. The word had acquired, in public usage, the specific connotation of organized deception by governments — a meaning it would never entirely shed.

But the practices Bernays had built his career on were, by any analytical account, propaganda under the definitions then in circulation. He had worked for the CPI during the war. He had counseled corporations on how to shape public perception of their products and industries. He had helped the American Tobacco Company persuade women to smoke by associating cigarettes with women's suffrage and organized a public stunt — women smoking in the Easter Sunday parade in New York — that generated worldwide press coverage for a client.

These were exactly the kinds of systematic, interest-serving, technique-driven influence campaigns that the word "propaganda" described. Bernays needed a new name.

The Rename and Its Rationale

"Public relations" worked on several levels. First, it was descriptively neutral — it named a relationship (between an organization and its "publics") rather than a technique (the manipulation of belief). Second, it emphasized the professional and service-oriented nature of the work — a public relations practitioner "served" both clients and the public. Third, it implied a two-way exchange rather than a one-way transmission: the practitioner's job was to communicate the client's message to the public and to communicate the public's concerns back to the client.

That last element was Bernays's most ingenious move. By framing PR as a two-way flow of communication, he distinguished it from propaganda (one-way, top-down) and aligned it rhetorically with democratic values of dialogue and responsiveness. In practice, the two-way dimension of PR was often much thinner than the theory implied — clients were primarily interested in shaping public opinion, not in being shaped by it — but the framing was effective.

Bernays also recruited intellectual credibility for the new discipline. He drew on the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, for psychological grounding. He cited the sociologist Gustave Le Bon on crowd behavior. He positioned PR as applied social science rather than manipulation — a discipline that understood human psychology and used that understanding to serve the mutual interests of organizations and their publics.

What Changed and What Didn't

The rename changed the vocabulary but not the substance. The techniques Bernays and his successors employed — creating pseudo-events designed to generate media coverage, funding apparently independent voices to advance client interests, framing issues in ways that served client goals — were continuous with what had been called propaganda before the word became toxic.

What the rename accomplished, analytically, was to shift the moral presumption. "Propaganda" presumed guilt. "Public relations" presumed professional service. A propaganda campaign had to defend itself; a PR campaign was evaluated by its effectiveness. This shift in the default presumption has had enormous consequences for how we evaluate organized persuasion campaigns ever since.

The tobacco industry, which would become one of the most thoroughly documented propaganda operations in history, operated primarily through the public relations frame. Its campaigns to cast doubt on the scientific evidence linking cigarettes to cancer were run by PR firms, staffed by PR professionals, and described in internal documents as "public relations" problems requiring "public relations" solutions. The vocabulary made the moral question harder to ask.

The Bernays Legacy

Bernays lived to 103, dying in 1995. He spent much of his long career defending the legitimacy of what he had built — and occasionally admitting its dangers. In an interview late in his life, he expressed concern about a German émigré friend who had encountered his work:

"When I wrote Propaganda in 1928, I had no thought that it might be misused. Then I had a shock. I learned that Goebbels was a devoted reader of my books. He used my techniques to sell Nazism to the Germans."

The irony runs deep. The man who had renamed propaganda "public relations" to rehabilitate it professionally had, in doing so, helped legitimize a set of techniques that the Nazi Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda then used with devastating effect. The techniques did not become less effective or less harmful because they had been given a more respectable name.

Applying the Working Definition

This case study is useful for testing the working definition's limits in a specific way: the intent criterion.

Bernays clearly intended to influence public opinion. He clearly served his clients' interests. He clearly used techniques (manufactured events, strategic framing, coordinated media placements) that operated by shaping the information environment rather than by presenting evidence and inviting evaluation.

But did his campaigns "bypass or overwhelm critical reasoning"? Bernays would have said no — that he was giving journalists genuinely newsworthy information, that the public had the freedom to evaluate and reject his messages. Critics would say that manufacturing a staged event and presenting it to journalists as spontaneous news is precisely the kind of technique that operates by misrepresenting the information environment rather than adding to it.

The case is genuinely borderline — which makes it valuable. The more interesting question may not be whether Bernays's campaigns were propaganda by our definition, but whether the existence of "public relations" as a distinct professional category makes propaganda harder to identify when it occurs.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter's working definition requires that propaganda "uses techniques that bypass or overwhelm critical reasoning." Does Bernays's model of public relations meet this criterion? Defend your answer with reference to specific practices he advocated.

2. Bernays distinguished PR from propaganda partly by claiming PR was a two-way process — communicating the public's interests to the client as well as the client's message to the public. How much analytical weight should this distinction carry? Is there a meaningful difference between a PR campaign and a propaganda campaign that happens to include some audience research?

3. The renaming of propaganda as "public relations" helped legitimize a set of practices that might otherwise have faced more scrutiny. Can you identify a contemporary example of a practice that has been given a neutral-sounding name that obscures its persuasive function? (Consider: "branded content," "native advertising," "sponsored research," "astroturfing campaigns" rebranded as "grassroots movements.")

4. Bernays expressed regret that Goebbels had read his work. Is this regret analytically satisfying? Does the fact that a technique can be used for harmful purposes change our moral evaluation of the person who developed it for ostensibly legitimate purposes?