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 But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts .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: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd self-destructs. Editor's note: The following column first appeared in the Washington Times . The now-consumed 2014 has been perfectly described by some commentators as the year when facts died . Politicians, mobs in the streets and their willing accomplices in the media swamped us with lies, obfuscations or riots manifest because, as author Thomas Sowell has noted,"What matters today is how well you can concoct a story that fits people's preconceptions and arouses their emotions. Politicians like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, professional demagogues like Al Sharpton and innumerable irresponsible people in the media have shown that they have great talent in promoting a lynch mob." None of this is unique to 2014, however, nor is the aptitude to stir up a lynch mob the exclusive purview of politicians . It has been both the vocation and avocation of liberal media darlings for a very long time . In 2014, with almost perfect timing and illustrating the farce of the left, a liberal favorite -- New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- was exposed by the Sony email hack for just how much hypocrisy and contrivance rules her world . An Internet search of Ms  Dowd brings up a whole host of approving profiles and interviews over the years, with a particular column considered by her sycophants as one of her greatest accomplishments: the "takedown" of former New York Times investigative reporter Judith Miller . Ms  Dowd provided what many thought was the coup de grace against Ms  Miller when she wrote that column about her then-colleague at The New York Times, excoriating Ms  Miller for her coverage of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction WMD) leading up to the Iraq war . Ms  Miller, you see, had done the unthinkable . She reported what her investigation found on the issue , which also happened to be what the Bush administration and scores of other governments had also determined : Saddam was pursuing a WMD program and an untold number of those weapons were developed and undeclared . As her fellow liberal colleagues piled on Ms  Miller , Ms  Dowd's column, dripping in ridicule and moral authority, condemned the reporter for being a "stenographer" for the Bush administration . Ms  Dowd complained Ms  Miller's work"fit too perfectly" with what the White House had been asserting about WMD . In other words ,  Ms  Dowd accused Ms  Miller of being too close to her subject , essentially of colluding with others, of selling out to make someone happy or to further a shared agenda . It was absurd and petty . But what we didn't know at the time was that it was also a perfect case of projection . In emails revealed late last year by the Sony Pictures hack, Ms  Dowd, The New York Times' supposed paragon of journalistic ethics, was discovered to have assured a Sony executive that she would be sure to make her "look great" in a column, and appeared to promise to show the column to the executive's husband, a former Times reporter, beforehand . After the column ran, more emails were exchanged, with Ms  Dowd telling the executive,"I hope you're happy... let's do another." After her subject declared the columnist her "favorite person," Ms  Dowd gushed,"You're mine! You're amazing." Ms  Dowd has since denied that she provided the column in advance . That's possible . So was it a draft that was provided? And by someone other than herself? For those who might suggest this mistake of Ms Dowd's was a one-off, issues of character inform everything we do . Hypocrisy doesn't sneak up on you once . It's part of how you relate to the world . Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times from 2003 to 2011, confirmed to the left-wing blog Media Matters in 2011 that the newspaper's treatment of Ms  Miller was due to politics and to assuage the leftist critics . Mr  Keller confessed,"I let a year go by when a lot of people, particularly people on the left, became disenchanted with the Times because they saw it as having been cheerleaders for the war. I think I could have saved the paper a lot of trouble and some damage by dealing with [Ms  Miller's reporting] much sooner." Facts do tend to be pesky things, as Ms  Dowd and the rest of The New York Times crew found in 2014 . After years of morally superior, self-righteous preening, they had a problem : Judith Miller was proven right about WMD in Iraq . Revealed in a 2010 Wikileaks document dump, The New York Times finally wrote a 10,000 word story on "abandoned chemical weapons" in Iraq as it became evident our troops continued to be injured by them and their existence could no longer be denied . The New York Sun suggested the Times' story be viewed as "journalism's longest correction," and was "designed to try to extricate the Gray Lady from all these charges about how President George W  Bush and his camarilla lied about the danger of Saddam's chemical arsenal . It turns out that Iraq was littered with thousands of shells containing poison gas, like Sarin." In that 2005 column attacking Ms  Miller, Ms  Dowd dramatically warned her readers if Ms  Miller remained a reporter at The New York Times, the newspaper itself would be at risk . Ten years later, now with the Times on the verge of collapse, forced retirements, layoffs and plunging ad revenue, the facts are teaching a lesson in irony and hypocrisy to Ms  Dowd and everyone else at the Times who jettisoned the truth to soothe jealousies and pander to politics .

Solution: The now-consumed 2014 has been perfectly described by some commentators as the year when facts died