When bears feast and bulls run free: Bridging the gap between metaphor theory and core ideals in journalism practice in financial news reporting

Research in Cognitive Linguistics, Discourse Analysis and Frame Analysis has demonstrated that the use of metaphor in news reporting influences and affects how readers understand economic realities and their subsequent behaviours as consumers. However, to what degree are these advances reflected in the policies of financial news reporters and their editors? Analysing a corpus of journalism practices, ideals, principles and ethics declarations of the major and representative financial news media sources, this research seeks to determine whether metaphor is contemplated in their journalism policies and, if so, how. With the exception of a brief mention of metaphor in Reuters, the results appear to indicate a gap between metaphor theory and journalism praxis. Across the board, metaphor is not taken into account and thus no considerations are offered for its effective and ethical use. This research attempts to bridge the gap by identifying core common ethical principles in journalistic practice and how awareness and conversation between metaphor theorists and financial news reporters and their editors concerning metaphor would further the pursuit of core journalism standards to ultimately better serve the needs of news consumers.