Controversy continues to rage over the New York Times’s decision to exclude Senator Ted Cruz’s new book from its best-seller list.
The Times’s claim that it found evidence of bulk-buyers attempting to juke the book’s sales numbers was first refuted by Cruz’s publisher, HarperCollins, late last week. Now Amazon — the largest online book retailer in the country — has weighed in, saying that it found “no evidence” of the book being purchased in bulk, either.
“As of yesterday, ‘A Time for Truth’ was the number 13 bestselling book, and there is no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity in our sales data,” Sarah Gelman, Amazon’s director of press relations, told Politico’s Dylan Byers on Sunday.
In the first week of sales after its release on June 30, Cruz’s book sold more copies than all but two of the 20 titles on the Times’s best-seller list. But the paper informed HarperCollins last week that it would not be including A Time for Truth on the list, citing an “overwhelming preponderance of evidence . . . that sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases.”
#related#On Friday, HarperCollins said they had investigated the book’s sales and found “no evidence of bulk orders through any retailer or organization.” That opened the door for a stinging rebuke from the Cruz campaign, which accused the Times of perpetuating a “blatant falsehood” due to an “obvious partisan bias.”
“In leveling this false charge, the Times has tried to impugn the integrity of Senator Cruz and of his publisher HarperCollins.”
The Times continues to stand by its decision, despite other papers like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Chicago Tribune including Cruz’s book in their best-seller lists. The Times claims to have a unique and confidential formula for analyzing best-selling books, which it says goes “beyond simply the number of books sold.”
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.