It looks like it's limited to the very recent past. Apparently the creation of highly coordinated propaganda efforts by the US government dates back to World W

It looks like it's limited to the very recent past. Apparently the creation of highly coordinated propaganda efforts by the US government dates back to World War I, and there were similar British and German programs of the same era: > "Once the United States had entered the war, the U.S. government saw a need formally to enter the propaganda arena. The U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created to both centralize wartime communication and avoid restrictive European-style censorship... the CPI labored to create a homogeneous public opinion that accepted the war as a struggle of good versus evil waged to promote democracy around the world. The list of promotional activities undertaken by the Committee is impressive: a vast system of news handouts for journalists, tens of millions of copies of its pamphlets, wide circulation of war posters, several films, millions of advertisements donated by business organizations, war expositions in several states, "Americanization" Committees for each ethnic minority group, and 75,000 Four Minute Men speakers, who presented short appeals between features at the nation's movie houses. Through the work of the CPI, the official view of a just and idealistic war became ever present." Source: Propaganda studies in American social science: The rise and fall of the critical paradigm, Sproule (1987) https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/00335638709383794 https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/00335638709383794 History's judgement of WWI is varied, but many think it was entirely avoidable, and that the imperial desire by the 'Great Powers' (Britain, France, Germany, Russia) to control as many shipping and rail routes as possible, as well as oil fields and other overseas resources, was the main driving force behind the conflict, and diplomatic talks could have avoided the war. Trying to sell WWI as a war to prop up the British and French imperial projects, as well as to help keep the Russian czar in power, would not have been so easy.