The television star Markus Hermann refuses to grant interviews with newspapers unless he is given the right to approv...

shunhe on December 27, 2019

Hi @Ryan-Mahabir,

Let's try to diagram this one out. The first statement is an "unless" statement. Recall that we can diagram "X unless Y" as ~Y - >X. Thus, we get:

~MH given right to approve article pre-publication - > MH refuses to grant interviews.

The second statement tells us the following:

Compromises editorial integrity of GM newspaper - > GM newspaper refuses to do so.

Now we conclude that the Messenger does not interview Herman. How can we get to this conclusion? Note that if they don't give him the right to pre-publication approval, they won't interview him. So we have to get from giving him the right to pre-publication approval to GM not interviewing him, which could mean that giving him pre-publication approval would compromise their editorial integrity. Indeed, this is what (A) states:

Giving pre-publication approval - > Compromise editorial integrity.

And now we can see that no matter which fork in the road we take, GM won't be interviewing MH:

1) If they don't give the right to approve the article pre-publication, MH won't grant the interview.
2) They could give the right to approve the article pre-publication, but this compromises the editorial integrity of the GM newspaper, so they won't do it, which brings us back to the first option.

(B) is wrong because even if the Messenger has never given an interviewee the right before,m they could still give it in the future. There's always a first time for everything! (B) does not logically compel the conclusion of the argument as (A) does. Hope this helps!