Metaphor and Editorial Positioning in the Stock Market Crash of 2008: Organicist vs. Mechanicist Visions

The stock market crash of 2008, or "Black Week" at the New York Stock Exchange, was the start of what was to become the most significant international economic disaster since the Great Depression. The subject of this book is how the events at the New York Stock Exchange were reported on by significant online United States news sources using metaphor and to what extent their uses of metaphor were consistent with their general ideological positioning. More than thirty years of research in Cognitive Linguistics has explored how using metaphor in the media can influence not only the beliefs and attitudes of news consumers, but also the financial choices they make as a result, particularly in crisis scenarios. The findings of this research demonstrate a statistically significant preference in the sample of most "liberal" news sources for animate-biological metaphors which promote understanding of the stock market in terms of a living being that must be ‘nurtured’ through intervention as opposed to being ‘left alone’, which reflects more "conservative" or laissez-faire approaches to ameliorating market crisis scenarios.