ABSTRACT
As Pimlott (1951) observed in the middle of the last century: “Public relations is not a peculiarly American phenomenon, but it has nowhere flourished as in the United States. Nowhere else is it so widely practiced, so lucrative, so pretentious, so respectable and disreputable, so widely suspected and so extravagantly extolled” (p. 3). As well her advocacy of propaganda’s positive possibilities, Snow (1998, 2004a, 2004b) is unusual in her multiple accounts of contemporary US propaganda. Post 9/11, however, she is part of a growing trend in the US that both acknowledges PR as part of the same family of activities as propaganda, albeit as “its ‘black sheep’ cousin” (Carden, 2005, p. 614), and that exhorts the field to engage with it. Following Jowett and O’Donnell’s (1992) muted admission that “propaganda is not necessarily an evil thing” (p. 271), Burton St. John III (2006), for example, urges PR practitioners and scholars alike to “move beyond the 80-year-old progressive stance that refuses to acknowledge an ethical role for propaganda” (p. 227).
