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Opinion
Beware the Juggernauts of Journalism Written by William Urbanski
Wearing a mask is more than a way to stop germs: It is a badge of civic pride.
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
May 2020
OPINION
A
mong all the information, misinformation, memes, and videos about this whole coronavirus situation, one piece that stuck out to me was a certain article from Forbes magazine that encouraged people to not wear masks because they will not protect against the coronavirus and may even increase a person’s chances of contracting it. The article actually put forth some pretty convincing arguments to bolster its case and was written in a way that sounded, if nothing else, like the ultimate authority on the whole matter. But, as it turns out, it is not some big-time American juggernaut of journalism that will have the last word on this issue but rather a renegade English teacher, a rebel who plays by his own rules and who also happens to be the managing editor of Gwangju’s finest English-language news magazine. While the Forbes article reached a conclusion that I basically agreed with, it arrived at it by citing a number of apocryphal ideas employing faulty logic and served as an example of why it is so important to evaluate any source of information. Most importantly, the article missed the bigger picture, completely overlooking the societal functions that wearing a mask plays. The article in question makes a number of factual and logical errors. Most heinously, its interpretation of science and physics would shock the entire Nobel Prize committee, and make physicist Richard Feynman, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Marie Curie, Rene Descartes, and Albert Einstein, collectively turn over in their graves. It explains, at length, that common, disposable masks are ineffective in stopping the coronavirus because they are designed to stop germs from being spread outward, not stop them from coming inward. That is to say, people who are sick should wear masks to keep others from getting sick but wearing a mask will not stop others from spreading their germs to you. Setting aside all considerations about who should wear a mask and why, this implies that masks are made with a hitherto undiscovered, physics-defying material that acts as a oneway barrier to germs. The materials that masks are made of simply do not and cannot work this way because oneway barriers are impossible. If you take a piece of tissue
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and sneeze a germ at it, it does not matter which side of the tissue the germ hits – it will either block the germ or not. That being said, certain semi-permeable membranes do exist in nature, and they allow objects with very specific molecular properties to pass through a barrier in one direction only. These membranes exist at the cellular level and, without exception, need an external energy source to work. So, unless there has been a recent, ground-breaking discovery in the field of nanotechnology that allows for these semi-permeable membranes to work without an energy source and that very same technology has been magically inserted into all masks worldwide, Forbes’ little theory is dubious at best.
Exhibit B (right) shows Forbes’ novel postulation that magical substances exist that allow objects to pass through in one direction but not the other.
Next, let me jump aboard the fashionable bandwagon of criticizing the logical validity of arguments. The most egregious logical fallacy committed by the article is known as an “appeal to authority.” Forbes, because they are so well known and because the magazine took the time to include in the article some hyperlinks with some pretty spiffy graphics, are appealing to their own reputability. Nobody could really deny that Forbes is a household name, but that does not mean they should be taken at their word. Even though the journalist who put together the article may be a fine writer, he or she certainly lacks the prerequisite specialized expertise in microbiology to pontificate to the masses about the best course of action
4/24/2020 4:15:59 PM
