I thought the masks were used in the Scientology protests mostly as an allusion to that epic fail stick figure thing?

Anyhow, in the case of these newspapers, I think we can reasonably assume plain ignorance. They love masks. When they were reporting about Fukushima a year ago, they were running lots of dramatic pictures of little Japanese kids in white face masks and saying that people were trying to protect themselves against radiation. Those were hayfever masks.