And yet, for all its honking boosterism, that sales campaign was oddly hobbled from the start, because the product’s very name had come into the news, and into common conversation, as a dirty word.5 Ironically, the same great war drive that had made that alien term “propaganda” commonplace had also made the neutral term pejorative. At the very moment of the propagandists’ triumph as professionals, in other words, to be referred to as a “propagandist” was an insult.
