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.
One example is below.
Q: 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 But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts .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 .
A: 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
Rationale: 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"
Q: Will the awful power of the word 'slut' defeat feminists' efforts to reclaim it? It's been over twenty years since then - Bikini Kill frontwoman and Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna scrawled the word SLUT across her stomach . In the years since, there's been a book called Slut! , countless feminist debates over the reclamation of the word "slut" and, in 2011, thousands of women took to streets across the globe in anti-rape marches called SlutWalks - a reference to how victims of sexual assault are often blamed for the violence done to them . Like "cunt" and "bitch", many feminists have long tried to wrest away from its original users the power and harm of the word "slut" and to give it new meaning . Increasingly, though, it's seeming like we might not succeed any time soon . Take Leora Tanenbaum: in 2000, she wrote Slut!: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation chronicling girls' and women's experiences with the word . She herself was called a "slut" as a high school student in the 1980s - long before the term "sexual harassment" was coined - and told me"I had no vocabulary to understand what happened." Now, 15 years later, Tanenbaum is about to publish another book: I Am Not a Slut because, in part, the sheen of reclaiming "slut" seems to have worn off over the years . When she spoke to women who called themselves "sluts" with a "positive and defiant" spirit, all told her the decision had turned against them later- and all regretted it . Tanenbaum told me that, when women are in closed circle or close-knit community - like a protest with like-minded people, or among friends who understand the cheeky appropriation of the word - identifying as a "slut" can be empowering . But what inevitably happens, especially in today's digital culture where revenge porn, stolen pictures and cyber harassment is the norm, is that "it always spills outwards." For them it was an amazing feminist experience , but it didn't last . Every single person I spoke to who intentionally embraced a "slut" persona ended up being treated terribly by people outside of her circle , because the culture we live in is so dominated by the sexual double standard . But beyond women who tried to reclaim "slut" for themselves, other feminists have rightfully asked why we should all try to reclaim a word with so much baggage - especially a word that impacts different women differently, and brings them a lot more pain than righteous justice . SlutWalks, for example, are no longer the cause celebre they once were because some women of color spoke out against the ways in which the protests and the reclamation of "slut" focused on the ability of white women to simultaneously embrace the word and reject its meaning . A group of black female academics, activists, and writers wrote an open letter explaining that "as Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves 'slut' without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is." Rutgers professor and writer Brittney Cooper wrote at the time,"To organize a movement around the reclamation of a term is in and of itself an act of white privilege." In response, some SlutWalk organizers changed the name of their protests ; today , while a handful of SlutWalks remain , the excitement over the movement has waned noticeably . But women everywhere are still being actively, physically hurt by the stereotypes that lead people to call them "sluts" . Just look to the high profile deaths of young women who were slut-shamed and a mass shooting where the killer said he was targeting "blonde sluts" : we're still being targeted because of our identities and sexualities , and it has, perhaps appropriately, put a damper on the once-celebratory reclamation of the word . Maybe that the wounds inflicted by "slut"- and the culture that encourages people to define women that way - that we once hoped were superficial are just too raw and too deep . Maybe the speed of the internet is too fast for us to control a word with so much potential to damage . There' s a poster on my living room wall by artist Favianna Rodriguez that reads:"I'm a Slut. I Vote. So Does Everyone I Sleep With. And You're About to be More Fucked Than I Am." For me, it captures the brash, in-your-face spirit that the feminist movement I've loved is known for . But in this time of unprecedented feminist power, the conversation about "slut" can be more reflective than fevered . Women who want to call themselves "sluts" shouldn't stop, or be made to stop - I love that women can embrace that which is meant to hurt them and find power in it . But I also know that we can still claim our sexuality and agency without using a word meant to denigrate- a word that still hurts so many people . Besides , we don't need "slut" to tell us what we already know: women have sex , some people don't like that and we're going to continue to do it anyway .
A:
Like "cunt" and "bitch", many feminists have long tried to wrest away from its original users the power and harm of the word "slut" and to give it new meaning