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.
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 But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts .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 .
Example 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
Example explanation: 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"

Problem: There is no debate about torture. The Senate Intelligence Committee's scathing torture report not only described the brutality of the CIA's interrogation methods, but also demonstrated their ineffectiveness . Led by ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, former Bush administration officials have rushed to the airwaves to defend the CIA . "I would do it again in a minute," Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press , claiming that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) produced "actionable intelligence that kept us safe from attacks" . Cheney & Co may not win the debate , but they have succeeded in muddying the waters . That is unfortunate because, beneath their bombastic caricatures of the torture programme, there's more agreement than first appears among people who actually count . Aside from former officials trying to save their reputations, it isn't one camp saying torture didn't "work" and one saying it did . Rather , it's one camp saying it didn't, and the other saying "we have no idea but did it anyway" . On several key points, the CIA is closer in substance to the Senate report than to its loudest defenders . 'Unprepared' for torture . The Senate report found that the CIA was "unprepared" to operate a detention and interrogation system . The Agency's written response to the report says;"We fully agree" - the CIA had "no cadre of trained and experienced interrogators, little experience handling and moving prisoners, and no core competency in prison management . [...] The Agency had too few analysts and linguists with the expertise required to support[a detention] programme" . In other words ,  there is no dispute that the programme was started and run on the fly . A critical finding of the Senate report was that torturing detainees did not yield otherwise unobtainable actionable intelligence . CIA director, John O Brennan, admitted that the agency "has not concluded that it was the use of EITs that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees" . So while the CIA still maintains that it gained valuable intelligence from detainees , it is not saying the abusive methods produced it . The Senate report also describes how the CIA sought out two psychiatrists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to construct the torture programme instead of actual experienced interrogators, on the assumption that long-established humane and lawful interrogation methods wouldn't work . In its response, the CIA acknowledged that it had to look beyond the agency to find experts on "non-standard means of interrogation" since it was not an area of expertise that CIA officers or the US government possessed . The CIA called Mitchell and Jessen's background "so unique" that the agency "would have been derelict had[it] not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the programme" . In other words ,  the torture programme was so out of whack with what professional interrogators do that the CIA had to go outside the US government to find people to do it . There still are important areas of disagreement between the Senate report and the CIA . The CIA is too protective of its own to acknowledge the full import of its descent into torture or to disavow the programme entirely . But the agency - unlike its loudest defenders - is not endorsing torture as a means of gaining intelligence or keeping the country safe . To be sure , basing the case against torture on its total ineffectiveness is a risky proposition . Torture produces a lot of information and while victims frequently make things up to ease their suffering , they may also on occasion say things of some value . That's why it is important to remember that torture is illegal under any circumstances regardless of its utility . But in a democracy, the strength of legal norms depends partly on their acceptance by the public . So while the public shouldn't have to be persuaded that barbaric methods fail to make them safer , doing so reinforces their illegality . The flurry of media appearances by Cheney and other torture defenders has created a false sense that there is a genuine divide over whether torture"works" . But neither the CIA nor professional interrogators actually say that . So while we can continue to debate other aspects of the CIA programme , including whether those responsible should be sanctioned , let's stop pretending that there are two legitimate sides to this particular story .

Solution: The Senate Intelligence Committee's scathing torture report not only described the brutality of the CIA's interrogation methods, but also demonstrated their ineffectiveness "I would do it again in a minute," Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press