“The modern master of the propaganda game was PR genius Edward Bernays, Viennese-born nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays took propaganda seriously for his career work: he combined individual and social psychology, public opinion studies, political persuasion and advertising to construct “necessary illusions” which filtered out to the masses as “reality.”
http://www.criticalthink.info/webindex/bernays.htm
“Bernays was a press officer for Woodrow Wilson at the peace conferences in Europe following World War I, his job being to present Wilson in the most favourable light possible in order to boost his popularity with the American public. By this time the word propaganda was already gaining a sinister implication in the West due to its association with communism, and Bernays coined the term Public Relations as a positive alternative. Back in America Bernays set to work for major corporations, with one of his most spectacular successes being to help break the taboo against women smoking. He paraded a group of attractive young ladies through New York smoking and bearing the slogan ‘March for Freedom’. Anyone criticising the idea of women smoking would now appear to be against freedom, and the numbers of women taking up the habit shot through the roof.