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.

[EX Q]: 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 .
[EX A]: The now-consumed 2014 has been perfectly described by some commentators as the year when facts died

[EX Q]: Paris terror attack: Journalism is under fire. Courageous journalism is under attack today . The horrifying shooting by masked gunmen at a Paris magazine office, which has left 12 dead, is an assault on everyone in the news business . And the fact that the paper, Charlie Hebdo, is a satirical publication matters not at all , since satire can sting as sharply as any media commentary -- especially when it comes to the sensitive subject of religion . Several news outlets are reporting that the attackers identified themselves as being from Al Qaeda in Yemen . But whatever branch of Islamic terrorism is responsible for this heinous crime, the targeting of the French paper is no accident . On its cover today is a caricature of a controversial novelist, Michel Houellebecq , whose book"Submission" forecasts a France run by Muslims and where polygamy is practiced . And the last tweet posted by the magazine was a mocking spoof of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi . Charlie Hebdo has been a target before . Its offices were firebombed in 2011 after the paper ran a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad vowing "100 lashes if you don't die laughing!" The vicious attack would be shocking news even if the target was an insurance company office . But by singling out a media enterprise -- especially one that has dared to poke fun at Islam-- the terrorists are sending an even louder message , one designed to frighten and intimidate . We saw the same evil calculation in the decision by ISIS to kill journalists James Foley and Steve Sotloff and to circulate video of their beheadings . This was a way to amplify the propaganda value of such executions and generate even more coverage by journalists who felt an instinctive kinship with their fallen brethren . That ploy worked , as ISIS sparked weeks of anguished coverage around the globe , and the images of the soon-to-be-murdered journalists, published far too often in my view, became the face of Islamic terror . After that, even as the U.S  and its allies struck back at ISIS in Iraq and Syria , the coverage greatly receded . Terrorists understand the media's need to personalize a tragic story . Wednesday's attack was also a far bloodier version of the Sony Pictures hacking , which was aimed at paralyzing and humiliating a media company over its ill-advised film that depicted North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un's head being blown up . That act of cyberterrorism also served as a warning to other media outfits that might take on North Korea . Charlie Hebdo specialized in skewering sacred cows . "Its pages are filled with vulgar caricatures and caustic humor, lampooning politicians, entertainers and media personalities of all stripes," the New York Times reported three years ago,"and the magazine has found itself a frequent presence at Paris courts, accused on several dozen occasions of defamation or inciting hate . "The world's religions have also been favorite targets of the paper, this being France, where state-mandated secularism is a sort of religion of its own. The cover page of one recent issue featured a cartoon of three rolls of toilet paper, labeled Bible, Koran and Torah, and the headline: 'In the toilet, all the religions .'". The danger now is that journalists around the world will engage in self- censorship, that they will pull back on aggressive reporting and analysis of Islamic terrorism . For every potentially provocative article, headline or cartoon, some will ask themselves, is this worth the risk? Wouldn't it be easier, safer, to let this one go? And each time that happens, the gunmen who unleashed a hail of bullets in a Paris magazine office Wednesday will have won . Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m  and 5 p.m  ET) . He is the author of five books and is based in Washington . Follow him at @HowardKurtz . Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz .
[EX A]: Courageous journalism is under attack today

[EX Q]: Charlie Hebdo and western liberalism. Another horrific tragedy has struck a western capital in the violent murder of French journalists and cartoonists at a satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo . The culprits appear to have done so in response to the magazine's publication of cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims , though they were also thought to have been radicalised by the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq . French society - and indeed, the global reaction - has been united in its condemnation of the attack and French authorities mobilised the full strength of the state's law enforcement agencies to track down the assailants , who were killed after a standoff with police on Friday . As with most incidents of violence involving Muslims, however, the ensuing public discussion has revolved largely around resolute vows to uphold a fundamental value of western civilisation - the freedom of expression - and degenerated into recriminations about Islam's purported assault on that very freedom . As a result, the natural expressions of grief and sympathy on behalf of the victims have taken on the added quality of high-minded liberal support for the content of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, irrespective of the publication's history of racism towards Muslims and people of colour . Hegemonic narrative . It is only by uncritically adopting the hegemonic narrative of western liberalism that one could reach the conclusion that the biggest threats to freedom of expression in the world today are Islam and North Korea . To frame these events without accounting for the broader context and power relationships at work inhibits any sensible understanding of the deep conflicts plaguing our world at present . By positing western liberal claims to freedom against Islam's supposedly intolerant attitude towards irreverent or serious critiques of it would be to ignore completely the history underlying the current tensions . The reality is that for as long as there have been liberal ideals staking their claim to the various freedoms western societies have come to sacralise, there have also been societies suffering from exploitation and subjugation at the hands of those professing these lofty principles . Even as they were establishing the very foundations of modern liberal societies, from the tenets of freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion to the basis for democratic forms of governance, Enlightenment thinkers were nearly universal in their expression of support for a world built on racial hierarchies and the expansion of new European empires that depended largely on the use of violence to control colonial subjects . That these philosophers developed their racist outlooks towards Jews, Muslims, and blacks on the basis of "reason" and "rationality" makes such views more abhorrent than those derived from pre-modern modes of thought . Whether it is the racist expressions of Enlightenment philosophers or the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo , these provocative views cannot be separated from the broader political projects at work . At the same time that western liberalism gave rise to modern states committed to freedom, democracy, and the rule of law , it also saw to the continuation of slavery, the colonisation and subjugation of large segments of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, and global economic exploitation and environmental degradation . Within Europe, western liberal ideals, whose proponents had never concealed their racist and exclusionary outlooks, could not avert the rise of a fascist movement in the mid-20th century that pursued the extermination of millions of people . Even after the devastation of World War II, European appetites for destruction were seemingly unsatiated , as the next two decades were marked by struggles for independence from European powers by colonised peoples in the global south . Faced with the prospect of supporting the freedom of the Algerian people, many French liberal intellectuals instead offered enthusiastic support for the brutal suppression of the Algerian struggle in a war that featured the widespread use of torture and the death of over 150,000 Algerians . "They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race." Writing on European Jews, this quote comes not from a propagandist in Nazi Germany, but rather from Voltaire, the 18th century French philosopher whose name has been invoked frequently in recent days as a historic champion of the freedom of expression . Voltaire's views on Islam were no more tempered , as he authored an entire play dedicated to mocking its Prophet Muhammad as "the founder of a false and barbarous sect" and "a sublime and hearty charlatan" . While one can defend the right of satirists, government officials, and philosophers to espouse such beliefs  - the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie became a popular means of expressing solidarity with the magazine in the hours after the attack- in the face of this history, it should become clear that in the case of cultural production, context always matters . Destructive policies cannot be pursued successfully without the vocabulary and imagery of racism and hatred of the other . One cannot attempt to comprehend the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik or the recent report on the US government's torture of Muslim prisoners solely against the backdrop of western liberal ideals . However , when one considers the rise of a pervasive Islamophobic atmosphere as seen in prominent discourses across the US and Europe , one can understand the reason such violence becomes possible and, indeed, normalised . The significance of the question of what can be deemed appropriate speech goes far beyond its propensity to offend Muslim minorities, to its potential to have corrosive effects on the broader society . In the same way that western governments take great care to prevent the spread of ideas and messages they consider culpable for radicalising Muslims (all pretensions about freedom of expression be damned) , they should consider the role that anti-Muslim cultural production plays in facilitating their own abuses of human rights, and radicalising their own citizens , as seen in the wave of anti-Muslim terrorism that has witnessed a marked rise in the past decade . Commenting on the recent string of Islamophobic statements by Bill Maher and Sam Harris , religion scholar Karen Armstrong noted,"this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps" . The current permissibility of dehumanising expressions against Muslims has a legacy in the anti-Semitic tropes of a century earlier . Both stem from the same noxious logic of exclusion . In fact , western countries have had no qualms about setting aside their liberal values to offer full-fledged support to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East that, incidentally, create the repressive climate that has been proven to give rise to militant extremism . Nor have western societies proved unwilling to abandon claims about support for free speech when the question of social cohesion arises . France banned rallies in solidarity with Gaza during last summer's war and the state has consistently prosecuted writers, comics, and even cartoonists whose work was deemed to risk "disruption to the social order" . French Prime Minister Manuel Valls commented on the state's robust record of prosecuting artists saying:"Faced with this creativity of hate, should we do nothing? Certainly not." In 2008, Charlie Hebdo fired an artist and writer for a column that the editors found to be anti-Semitic . At this juncture, western Muslims remain excluded from national dialogues regarding the question of social cohesion . The historical continuity of racial discrimination, coupled with a ramped up pursuit of strategic objectives across a number of Muslim countries during the last two decades have seen to it that an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility has permeated the public sphere in the US and revived the legacy of intolerance in Europe . To understand and counteract the violent behaviour of extremists , these tragic events should be examined in light of this context, rather than through the lens of free speech . From Voltaire and the Enlightenment to the present, modern western discourses are replete with critiques of Islam . By contrast, the abhorrent violence by some Muslims is a recent phenomenon, and one that must be confronted by addressing the failure of western liberalism to live up to its stated ideals, not by reflexively continuing to sing its praises .
[EX A]:
As with most incidents of violence involving Muslims, however, the ensuing public discussion has revolved largely around resolute vows to uphold a fundamental value of western civilisation - the freedom of expression - and degenerated into recriminations about Islam's purported assault on that very freedom It is only by uncritically adopting the hegemonic narrative of western liberalism that one could reach the conclusion that the biggest threats to freedom of expression in the world today are Islam and North Korea