"Propaganda" has been and continues to be a troublesome term. Many social scientists believe that the term is not particularly useful, since arriving at a workable definition of propaganda remains difficult. Other scholars are convinced that propaganda can and must be studied as a separate subject in its own right. No consensus on the definition of propaganda seems likely in the near future, but, after several decades in which almost no studies of propaganda were published, propaganda enjoyed a modest comeback in the 1980s and 1990s. Several important books and academic journal articles devoted to the subject appeared during those decades.

While labeling something as "propaganda" was widely perceived as pejorative through most of the twentieth century, the term did not always have an unpleasant connotation. While Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell (1999) traced the systematic study and application of propaganda techniques to ancient Greece and Rome in...