THIS JUST IN: The Economist Took a Close Look at the NYT’s Bestseller List and Found What Conservatives Long Suspected.
Books that are not bestsellers have it worse, according to The Economist. A book that ranks in the bottom five of Publishers Weekly rankings will on average place five spots lower on the Times’ list, the analysis concluded.
Michael Knowles, a conservative commentator, is author of the 2021 book “Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.”
In its first week, it sold 17,587 copies — good for first place on Publishers Weekly’s list. The book recorded robust sales in the weeks that followed.
Nonetheless, it failed to crack the Times’ bestseller list.
“The New York Times has a view of an acceptable kind of conservative,” Knowles told The Economist.
Ari Fleischer, who was White House press secretary during the George W. Bush administration, is author of the 2022 book “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias.”
The book reached as high as number six on Publishers Weekly’s list of bestselling non-fiction works in the summer of 2022.
But the book was nowhere to be found on the Times’ list.
“It’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating,” Fleischer told The Economist.
Back in the summer of 2008, the New York Sun reported: Encounter Books Crosses Times Off Mailing List.
Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company’s Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has “studiously” ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.
In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn’t think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a “wake-up call” to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a “moderate left-wing opportunist” responsible for perpetuating the “travesty” that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of “press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion” and “metrosexual lifestyle stuff,” Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun’s phone call for comment.)
When he was named the editor of the Times Book Review in 2004, many believed that Mr. Tanenhaus would be sympathetic to the intellectual right, Mr. Kimball noted, citing Mr. Tanenhaus’s well-received biography of Whittaker Chambers. And yet, throughout his tenure as the head of the Sunday books section, Mr. Kimball charged, Mr. Tanenhaus has assigned those few conservative books the paper has covered to reviewers who seem to have their own axes to grind, and who appear to have little interest in giving the books an objective reading.
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Others books that sold well but which were conspicuously absent from the Times’ bestseller list include “A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America,” by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and “American Playbook: A Guide to Winning Back the Country from the Democrats,” by commentator Clay Travis.
As I wrote in 2015, after the Times’ memory holed Ted Cruz’s book, despite first week sales that would put him at number three on their list, “In early 2009, at the peak of the left’s ‘We Are Socialists Now’ shiny Obama unicorn fever, Tanenhaus, then still editor of the Times’ book review section, infamously published a thin screed titled The Death of Conservatism. About five minutes later, the Tea Party emerged, and by the end of 2010, thanks in large part to the all-Democrat Obamacare bill, the GOP recaptured the House, in 2014 the Senate, and currently 31 states have Republican governors and the GOP controls numerous state legislatures.”
Based on the Gray Lady’s performance in 2020, Tanenhaus would likely seem far too fair and balanced for the current iteration of the newspaper.