Dissipation Of Ethics And Obligeant In Journalism: A Study Of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang And Hayduke Lives!

Abstract

Edward Abbey is a twentieth-century American novelist, essayist, critic, and environmentalist. His writings reflect uncompromising environmental philosophies that create awareness among people about environmental issues such as deforestation, laying roads into natural places, and mining. The present study concentrates on Abbey’s two novels The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives!. These novels explicate how the environment is getting degraded to lead sophisticated lives by human beings. In these novels, Abbey portrays of the tendency of humans to exploit nature to lead a comfortable life. He attempts to instil the importance of preventing environmental degradation through the common characters in the both novels like Hayduke, Dr. Sarvice, Smith, and Abbzug. They meet one another on a river trip and form a group called The Monkey Wrench Gang and they engage in the activities of protecting nature by making economic losses to the firms which engage in destructing nature. The present article differs from existing research and it primarily focuses on how media fail to abide by the ethics of journalism and how they deviate from exercising their sole responsibility in reporting news. It is so obvious that the Media are doing favour to certain entities since the maximum amount of dividend of the Media is held by other firms. Journalists are enforced not only to reach out to the people with news that makes them aware of impending risks in the future like pandemics, environmental issues, climate change, and social problems (communal and religious issues) but also to cover the news that carries commercial values in the sight of capturing the market. In this regard, Media personnel fail to practice their ethics by taking a stand of favouring somebody by ignoring the truth. It is vividly accounted in The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! Due to the failure to exercise the ethics of media, an important issue (environmental degradation) that should have been addressed louder to the world was ignored completely by paying attention to the news that carries commercial values.