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 But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts .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: Joan Didion as the new face of Celine? That's so smart. In dark days, the heart cleaves disproportionately to Lilliputian scraps of good news and so it was that as events played out in Paris last week, I kept thinking of the writer Joan Didion, the star of Celine's latest ad campaign, tiny in black, her porcelain face half obscured by sunglasses as big and as inky as the dinner plates in the kind of restaurants frequented by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho . Oh, the brilliance of Didion! I like to think of myself as wholly resistant to the wicked wiles of big fashion , but this campaign seemed somehow to have got through , and I was all aflutter . What, I wondered, was the provenance of the socking great pendant that hung about her neck in Juergen Teller's photograph? Was it by Celine or was it, as they say, model's own? Could I find something similar on eBay? All day long, between work and news bulletins, I restlessly Googled various combinations of the words "buy", "vintage", "bronze", "large" and "locket" . The coverage of the Paris fashion house's decision to make the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking its new face has focused mostly on her age . Didion is 80 ; when she began her career as a writer at American Vogue in the late 50s, the personnel director of the magazine's owner, Conde Nast, would from time to time stop her in the hall and ask her when she had last called her mother . Apparently, we should celebrate Teller's photograph of her as a particularly exalted example of fashion's increased willingness to embrace models with wrinkles, liver spots and histories that trail all the way back to the days when women still wore white gloves and little hats to work . At last, the thinking goes, fashion has realised that beauty may also come with silver hair . What? You don't buy that? Well, then . Think of it this way . At least it seems finally to have grasped that women don't simply give up shopping the moment they turn 50 . But it's not Didion's age that interests me . It's her status as a writer and thinker . By choosing her- acclaimed and bestselling, but also trenchant, highly mannered and somewhat complicated - Celine's creative director, Phoebe Philo, is sending out quite a bracing message , even if the semaphore in which it's written will, alas, be largely illegible to those who know nothing of Didion . There' s something going on beyond the cunning commercial appeal to the kind of conflicted consumer who values the inner life as much as the outer  - I mean the kind of woman whose "buttery" leather tote must be big enough to contain at least one hardback if it is not to make her feel guilty for the rest of her life . Isn't this campaign also in the business of suggesting that to be clever and a touch difficult(Didion is nothing if not unpredictable) is to be timelessly beautiful? That this is, in fact, a state to which women might like to aspire? Oh, Phoebe! If only I could afford your gorgeous, minimalist gear , I would dash out and buy something right now just to say thank you . And yet how often have I chickened out? How often do I try, even now, to wear pretty clothes, fun clothes, to embrace colour and print and embroidery? To toddle along in shoes in which I cannot run or even, if I'm honest, walk? Like most professional women who are neither beautiful nor willing to play dumb all of the time, I fear being thought ugly or uncompromising or seeming as if I have not made an effort . I fear, if you will, being seen to be picking a fight, whether by the way I speak or the way I dress . I guess you could say that I wear the swishy frock and high heels the better that I might be allowed, sometimes, to speak my mind . I adore the way that Didion, half child and half sphinx, thinner than a cigarette, looks . But she is not, and never has been, classically beautiful . Nor is she willing to play the fool . She is discreet, but never decorous ; she is fierce, preternaturally observant and, sometimes, a little self-obsessed . And her clothes - unfussy, elegant, practical, a touch forbidding - reflect this . What Teller's photograph says to me is: approach with caution; subject may bite . I love the continuity in this, the wholeness, the confidence in the way that the clothes are an extension of the personality - and I salute Phoebe Philo for recognising it, for extolling it to the world as worthy of admiration, as a thing to be replicated by those women who have the pluck, if not exactly the hard cash .
A:
In dark days, the heart cleaves disproportionately to Lilliputian scraps of good news