Figure 1.

Metaphor use in Google News and Google Scholar search results. The ratio of hits found on Google News compared to Google Scholar for all time (light blue bars) and for 2016 (dark blue bars). The metaphors used to describe genetic modification appear on the X-axis. Hits were obtained by searching Google News or Google Scholar using (“gene [metaphor]” OR “genetic [metaphor]”). Then, the ratio of News/Scholar was obtained and graphed. Journalists publish proportionally more articles using the editing metaphor. All other metaphors appear more often in academic writing or equally frequently. See Table 1 for the raw numbers of hits from Google News and Google Scholar (obtained from Google searches on 12/19/2016).