It's not. I've personally heard it used to mean political speech in general, and separately to mean dishonest political speech internally. The definition seems to vary based on cultural background.

It's such an ugly word, we prefer the term "public relations"...

In Psychological Warfare (1948), Linebarger apologises that he (having been subject to army approval for publication) only gives examples of enemy propaganda, but reassures the reader that the Allied departments in which he worked churned out exactly the same kinds of thing in the opposite direction, and even relates an anecdote of reverse engineering a captured Japanese PsyWar HQ to discover that their org charts looked very familiar, very much like his own.

Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive mass communication as a good thing.

It's related to a progressivist and modern view of societies being at different points of the same trajectory between primitive and advanced, or later, developing and developed. Forcing mass communication on people brought their primitive minds to a better state, they thought.

During the postwar period mass communication was honed by academics and married private capital, producing somewhat scientific marketing disciplines optimising for efficiency in changing people's minds at scale. Puppet theaters as mass communication wouldn't have survived that if they were still around.

Seeing similarities with advertising is rather easy even without this historic connection.

Given the negative meaning that the word "propaganda" has today, I think we should only apply it to deceits or outright lies. If a government disseminates information that serves it's interests, but this information is also a decently subjective representation of reality, we should use some other word for it.

For example, Radio Liberty was used as "propaganda" tool by the US. However, it was also a fairly good source of information — certainly closer to the truth than soviet mass media at the time. Should we really call it propaganda, putting it into the same category as aforementioned soviet media? I don't think so.

It has become the very thing it describes, defensively

It's merely a euphamism treadmill. Propaganda wasn't always a bad word - The US was proud of it's propaganda departments in WWII. The Office of War Information was quite explicit that it was propaganda, and used the term neutrally; It had both good and bad connotations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In... https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/walt-disney-classified...