A thought-provoking story from Cybercast News Service:

The reported killing of a senior al Qaeda operative by a CIA-launched missile in Pakistan on Dec. 1 has sparked debate among terrorism experts over the true identity of the target and the accuracy of numerical rankings that the Pentagon and White House have attached to other captured or killed terrorists.

Some say the rankings represent public relations run amok, while others say they prove that the U.S. continues to rely on faulty Pakistani intelligence.

On Dec. 3, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told reporters that Abu Hamza Rabia had been killed in an explosion two days earlier … Several American news organizations, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, then quoted multiple, unnamed U.S. intelligence officials as saying that Rabia was al Qaeda’s number-three man, the operational commander or military commander, all terms typically used interchangeably. Headlines around the world trumpeted the death of the “al Qaeda number three man”…

Rabia has never appeared on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list and no known reward has been posted for his capture…

A LexisNexis database search turns up no news articles written about Rabia prior to his reported killing, except for an Aug. 18, 2004, announcement by the Pakistani government of a reward for his capture and that of six other al Qaeda suspects accused of attempting to assassinate President Musharraf on Dec. 14 and 25, 2003…

When questioned about Rabia, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey told Cybercast News Service that he had never heard of the man.

Terrorism expert and author Evan F. Kohlmann … believes that the whole Pentagon and White House practice of assigning numeric rankings to terrorists “doesn’t make any sense”…

“That’s the problem of the numbers game. It’s a way to sell a story to media. But people wind up then doubting credible information coming from the military, for example,” he added. “This is a PR guy’s dream, turned nightmare.”

Media Orchard’s brass-tacks analysis:

Simplifying stories is part of what PR practitioners do; for good or ill, simple is what the media and public want to hear.

The lesson here is that you can’t sacrifice accuracy for simplicity, or you ultimately risk losing credibility. Don’t force it.

Technorati tags: Journalism, PR, Public Relations, Marketing