On January 6, 1622, Pope Gregory XV founded the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to coordinate Catholic missionary work worldwide. Propagare means to spread, as in plants: propagation. For three centuries the word was neutral to positive, simply meaning organized dissemination. The pejorative charge arrives with mass politics: both sides industrialized it in World War I, and by the 1920s the word itself needed a reputation manager.
Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and a veteran of the wartime Creel Committee, opened his 1928 book Propaganda by arguing that an invisible government of persuaders regimented the masses, and called the craft the engineering of consent. Because propaganda had gone sour as a word, he sold the same product under a new label: public relations. His 1929 Torches of Freedom march paid debutantes to smoke in the Easter parade, converting cigarettes into women's liberation and proving his uncle's theories paid better in advertising than in analysis.
The claim: propaganda is not what enemies do, it is what institutions do, and the rebranding to public relations, strategic communication, and content is a laundering cycle that repeats whenever the old word gets caught. Verdict: structurally true that persuasion operations rename themselves when exposed, from Propaganda Fide to PR to strategic communications, but the strong version, all communication is manipulation, dissolves the difference between persuasion and coercion, and that difference is the whole ballgame.
If the word was born as a missionary office, when did spreading a message become a sin?