Teacher: Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? If you are still confused, see the following example:
Our 'impartial' broadcasters have become mouthpieces of the elite. When people say they have no politics, it means that their politics aligns with the status quo . None of us are unbiased , none removed from the question of power . We are social creatures who absorb the outlook and opinions of those with whom we associate, and unconciously echo them . Objectivity is impossible . The illusion of neutrality is one of the reasons for the rotten state of journalism, as those who might have been expected to hold power to account drift thoughtlessly into its arms . But until I came across the scandal currently erupting in Canada, I hadn't understood just how quickly standards are falling . In 2013 reporters at CBC, Canada's equivalent of the BBC, broke a major story . They discovered that RBC - Royal Bank of Canada - had done something cruel and unusual even by banking standards . It was obliging junior staff to train a group of temporary foreign workers , who would then be given the staff's jobs . Just after the first report was aired, according to the website Canadaland, something odd happened : journalists preparing to expand on the investigation were summoned to a conference call with Amanda Lang, CBC's senior business correspondent and a star presenter . The reporters she spoke to say she repeatedly attempted to scuttle the story, dismissing it as trivial and dull . They were astonished . But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts . First ,  that Lang had spoken at a series of events run or sponsored by RBC  - for which she appears, on one occasion, to have been paid around 15,000 Canadian dollars . Second , that she was booked to speak at an event sponsored by the outsourcing company the bank had hired to implement the cruel practice exposed by her colleagues . Third , that her partner is a board member at RBC . Lang then interviewed the bank's chief executive on her own show . When he dismissed the story as unfair and misleading , she did not challenge him . That evening she uncritically repeated his talking points on CBC's main current affairs programme . Her interests, again, were not revealed . Then she wrote a comment article for the Globe and Mail newspaper suggesting that her colleagues' story arose from an outdated suspicion of business, was dangerous to Canada's interests, and was nothing but "a sideshow" . Here's what she said about the bank's employment practices:"It's called capitalism, and it isn't a dirty word." Canadaland, which exposed Lang's conflicts last week, found that other journalists at the broadcaster were furious, but too frightened to speak on the record . But after CBC tried to dismiss the scandal as "half-truths based on anonymous sources" , Kathy Tomlinson, the reporter who had broken the story about the bank, bravely spoke publicly to the website . The following morning, staff in her office arrived to find this message spelt out in magnets on their fridge:"Jesse Brown snitches get stitches" . Jesse Brown is Canadaland's founder . CBC refused to answer my questions , and I have not had a response from Lang . It amazes me that she remains employed by CBC , which has so far done nothing but bluster and berate its critics . This is grotesque . But it's symptomatic of a much wider problem in journalism : those who are supposed to scrutinise the financial and political elite are embedded within it . Many belong to a service-sector aristocracy, wedded metaphorically (sometimes literally) to finance . Often unwittingly, they amplify the voices of the elite, while muffling those raised against it . A study by academics at the Cardiff School of Journalism examined the BBC Today programme's reporting of the bank bailouts in 2008 . It discovered that the contributors it chose were "almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices . Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage." The financiers who had caused the crisis were asked to interpret it . The same goes for discussions about the deficit and the perceived need for austerity . The debate has been dominated by political and economic elites , while alternative voices - arguing that the crisis has been exaggerated, or that instead of cuts, the government should respond with Keynesian spending programmes or taxes on financial transactions, wealth or land- have scarcely been heard . Those priorities have changed your life : the BBC helped to shape the political consensus under which so many are now suffering . The BBC's business reporting breaks its editorial guidelines every day by failing to provide alternative viewpoints . Every weekday morning, the Today programme grovels to business leaders for 10 minutes . It might occasionally challenge them on the value or viability of their companies, but hardly ever on their ethics . Corporate critics are shut out of its business coverage - and almost all the rest . On BBC News at Six, the Cardiff researchers found, business representatives outnumbered trade union representatives by 19 to one . "The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world," the study said . This, remember, is where people turn when they don't trust the corporate press . While the way in which the media handle the stories that are covered is bad enough , the absence of coverage is even worse . If an issue does not divide the main political parties , it vanishes from view , though the parties now disagree on hardly anything . Another study reveals a near total collapse of environmental coverage on ITV and BBC news: it declined from 2.5% (ITV) and 1.6% (BBC) of total airtime in 2007 to, respectively, 0.2% and 0.3% in 2014 . There were as many news stories on these outlets about Madeleine McCann in 2014 - seven years after her disappearance - as there were about all environmental issues put together . Those entrusted to challenge power are the loyalists of power . They rage against social media and people such as Russell Brand, without seeing that the popularity of alternatives is a response to their own failures: their failure to expose the claims of the haut monde, their failure to enlist a diversity of opinion, their failure to permit the audience to see that another world is possible . If even the public sector broadcasters parrot the talking points of the elite , what hope is there for informed democratic choice? o Twitter: @georgemonbiot . A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com .
Solution: The illusion of neutrality is one of the reasons for the rotten state of journalism, as those who might have been expected to hold power to account drift thoughtlessly into its arms We are social creatures who absorb the outlook and opinions of those with whom we associate, and unconciously echo them
Reason: The text span selected for thesis is meaningful and correct. Pay attention that there can be more than one correct thesis for each article. Some meaningful subsets of this thesis also can be accepted as a thesis, like : "none of us are unbiased"

Now, solve this instance: Why Vladimir Putin should be at the Auschwitz memorial ceremony. On 27 January 1945 a reconnaissance patrol from the Soviet 107th Rifle Division emerged from the snow-laden forest 70km west of Krakow . The soldiers were mounted on shaggy ponies, their submachine guns slung across their backs . In front of them stood Auschwitz-Birkenau, the grimmest symbol of modern history . Officers gazed around in disbelief, then called in medical teams to care for the 3,000 sick prisoners left behind . It is a great shame that Vladimir Putin, having not been invited, won't be present at a memorial ceremony next week to mark the 70th anniversary - at the very least, it would have reminded the world that the advance of Stalin's Red Army forced the SS to abandon the extermination camps in the east . And yet the muted row over the Russian president's absence is a reminder that this particular chapter in Russia's second world war history was, and remains, full of contradictions . . The first death camp to be liberated by the Red Army was Majdanek just outside Lublin, in July 1944 . The novelist and war correspondent Vasily Grossman was on the spot with the 8th Guards Army , which had defended Stalingrad , but an order came down that he was not to cover the story . The job was given instead to Konstantin Simonov, a favourite of the regime , who managed to avoid mentioning that any of the victims in Majdanek were Jewish . Grossman, despite warnings from his friend Ilya Ehrenburg, had been slow to believe that antisemitism could exist within the Soviet hierarchy during the death struggle with Nazism . But in 1943 he had noticed that any reference to Jewish suffering was being cut from his articles . He wrote to complain to Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the chief of the Red Army political department . Shcherbakov replied:"The soldiers want to hear about [Russian military hero of the Napoleonic era] Suvorov, but you quote[German 19th-century poet] Heine" . Grossman joined Ehrenburg on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to chronicle Nazi crimes, unaware of how dangerous this might prove to be . Several of their colleagues were murdered by the secret police . Certain truths about the Shoah could never be published . When Grossman wrote about the extermination camp of Treblinka , he could not reveal that the auxiliary guards were mostly Ukrainian . Collaboration with the enemy was a taboo subject since it undermined the rhetoric of the Great Patriotic War . As the end of the war approached, controls became even stricter . Auschwitz may have been liberated at the end of January 1945 , but no details were released until the final victory in May . The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee soon found that its work was in direct opposition to the party instruction : "Do not divide the dead!" Jews were not to be seen as a special category of suffering . They were to be described only as citizens of the USSR and Poland . Thus in a way Stalin was the first Holocaust denier , even if his antisemitism was not quite the same as that of the Nazis . It was probably based more on a xenophobic suspicion of international connections than on racial hatred . Soviet propaganda, while designating those killed at Auschwitz in collectively anonymous terms as "victims of fascism", also portrayed the extermination camp as the ultimate capitalist factory, where the workers were murdered when no longer useful . And there was a further twist away from the truth . The Stalinists emphasised how many Poles had died there to distract attention from their own crimes against the Polish people, both following the Red Army's unprovoked invasion in 1939 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and its brutal occupation from 1944 . They portrayed Auschwitz as the place of martyrdom for the Polish nation . By talking only of the Polish Catholics who had died there, they hoped that the Poles might focus any anger at their bitter fate entirely against Germany and not against the Soviet Union . Few Poles were taken in during those postwar years of Soviet oppression . And now Putin's ill-disguised attempts to reassert Russian control over Ukraine have of course reminded the Polish people all too clearly of what Soviet "liberation" meant for them in 1945 . It is not therefore surprising that we should be seeing a certain amount of diplomatic shadow-boxing in the background , while both sides insist everything is normal . The Kremlin is pretending not to have been snubbed by the fact that President Putin has not been asked to the commemoration event ; meanwhile, the Polish government insists it was not issuing formal invitations . The Auschwitz international committee, which includes a Russian representative, was simply asking each government who would be representing them . Putin made a speech at Auschwitz 10 years ago on the 60th anniversary , and no doubt he will again proclaim in Moscow on 9 May- Russia's Victory Day - that the Red Army's defeat of "the fascist beast" saved Europe from Nazi slavery . But those countries, especially Poland and the Baltic states, that experienced the ensuing 40 years of Communist dictatorship glance nervously east once more . Russia, obsessed for centuries by a fear of encirclement and surprise attack, has always felt justified in dominating its "near abroad" . It was Stalin's shock at Hitler's invasion in 1941, and his consequent determination to create a defensive cordon, that led to the cold war . Putin, fortunately, is a very pale imitation of his hero . o Antony Beevor's next book, Ardennes - 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble, is out in May .
Student:
It is a great shame that Vladimir Putin, having not been invited, won't be present at a memorial ceremony next week to mark the 70th anniversary at the very least, it would have reminded the world that the advance of Stalin's Red Army forced the SS to abandon the extermination camps in the east