Abstract

While many news media organizations offer guidelines about specific journalism practices such as fact checking, attribution, mandatory referrals, etc., to promote quality and integrity of their news products in congruence with the publicly defended principles of journalism ethics such as truthfulness, objectivity, and balance, that news companies of all editorial positions defend, it appears that news media organizations have not benefitted from the more than 30 years of research in Cognitive Linguistics demonstrating how metaphor influences how readers perceive events in the news and how it impacts their attitudes and behavior. Focusing on stock market reporting, this article identifies and explores levels of ethical quality in metaphor production by financial news media providers because improving the ethical quality of specific news reporting mechanisms is one step toward improving the ethical quality of news media organizations as a whole. In this model, high levels of ethical quality, or trustworthiness in metaphor, is the result of achieving high levels of communicative accuracy. Communicative accuracy is the product of metaphorical efficiency, or the lowest ratio of cognitive force—input-output—needed by financial news consumers to process metaphor in order to stimulate predictable entailments, or limited creative and exploratory thought, resulting in high cognitive efficiency. Low ratios of cognitive force is achieved by using metaphors that reduce domain disparity in semantic fields employing domain concepts that are as familiar to the public or as similar in salient semantic features as possible. In the Appendix, this article provides a step-by-step rubric for implementing this model for journalists and editors in the production and editing phases.