The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard had a Friday morning piece that called out The New York Times for “diss-mot[ing]” conservative talk radio host Mark Levin’s new book Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism from the number one spot on their secret bestseller list.
“Media mogul Mark R. Levin's new conservative book, Rediscovering Americanism, has swamped the competition, selling over 100,000 copies in three weeks, but its deserved No. 1 ranking in the New York Times best-seller list is over,” reported Bedard.
Bedard pointed out that Levin’s book will be slotted at number two in the latest rankings even though “The Wall Street Journal has the Threshold Editions book as the nation's top selling nonfiction book as does the Conservative Book Club.”
Levin told Bedard that “[t]his is a disgrace” and lashed out at The Times on his eponymous radio talk show earlier in the week, proclaiming that “The New York Times obviously hates [the book].”
Here’s more of what Levin had to say to Bedard:
Despite the fact that my book sold more hardcover copies than any other non-fiction book last week, the New York Times just announced it was declaring a different book #1 on its list and my book would be dropped to #2. This isn't the first time the New York Times has done this to one of my books. There really needs to be an expose of this secretive process. It's one thing to ignore my books and not review them, it is quite another ignore the facts. The book sale numbers speak for themselves.
As NewsBusters has chronicled for years, The New York Times has routinely blacklisted and fudged the sales of books by conservatives, including Levin, Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Tex.), David Limbaugh, and The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel.
My colleague Tim Graham wrote this about the paper’s bestseller list on June 30, 2016 concerning The Times and Strassel’s book The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech:
Every week, Nielsen's BookScan produces a ranking of book sales around the country, and is estimated to capture 70 to 80 percent of all retail sales. Most organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, use BookScan as their way of ranking best-sellers. According to BookScan's list on Wednesday, The Intimidation Game was the sixth bestselling hardcover book in the nation for the past week. It came out on June 21 from Twelve Books.
When The New York Times announced its latest weekend best-seller list on Wednesday evening, The Intimidation Game was nowhere in the the top 15. In fact, it wasn't even on the extended list of the top 20 hardcover bestsellers, despite outselling books that did make the list. It did come up as No. 13 on the New York Times's e-book bestseller list for July 10. So the Times is aware of its sales, but its secret-sauce formula is somehow keeping it at bay....like other conservative best-sellers.
