Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

that, in the United States, became more institutionalized during the first decades of the twentieth century.³⁰ Current understandings of propaganda cast this phenomenon as systematically constructed messages designed to move mass audiences toward acceptance of attitudes, predispositions, and behaviors that benefit a privileged group. Contemporary concepts tend to focus on propaganda as deceitful and manipulative communication.³¹ Some scholars describe public relations in similar terms, but with a less-pejorative tone. For example, Grunig and Hunt situated PR in a four-stage typology, in which professional persuaders can advance from less-manipulative promotional practices to dialogic, two-way symmetrical communication.³² This has been an understanding of PR that has been widely referred to in scholarly work on both the history and typology of PR over the past several decades.³³

However, conceptual links between propaganda and public relations are often in flux. Some scholars, working from historical groundings, assert the existence of inevitable links between domestic propaganda practices after the war and the rise of the modern public relations industry; one scholar termed this interwoven ascent of propaganda and public relations as the arrival of “Big Communication.”³⁴ Indeed, some describe PR as a weaker extension of propaganda practices, characterized by powerful interests that have the resources to engage the public and construct their persuasive messages to appear as though they were dialogic.³⁵ Other scholars tend to study propaganda within episodic frames (e.g., religious endeavors, political campaigns, war scenarios, international relations disputes) and, therefore, tend to avoid discussion of historical or contemporary associations with the field of public relations.³⁶ Finally, other academics have attempted to parse differences between public relations and propaganda by examining how public relations attempts to act in the public interest by stimulating discourse—an impetus that is not necessarily a prerogative of propaganda.³⁷

During the interwar years, however, the terms “propaganda” and “public relations” had no clear, consistent delineation. In fact, the advance of the PR industry was understood to be an outgrowth of the CPI’s successful World War I propaganda practices. Using the skills they learned