An investigation by The Economist found The New York Times bestseller list is biased against books from conservative publishers, saying they are “7 percentage points less likely” to make the list than books from publishers with similar sales figures.
The publication used Publishers Weekly Bookscan from a 12-year period to draw up its study, identifying books from 12 publishers describing themselves as being conservative, including Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins specializing in conservative non-fiction, and Regnery Publishing, which calls itself America’s “leading publisher of conservative books.”
From that, a search of books released between June 2012 and June 2024 showed 250 titles, out of 4,169 making the Publishers Weekly top 25 hardcover non-fiction list.
The Economist then created a statistical model to determine if books would appear in the Times rankings, finding the books by the conservative publishers were less likely to appear than the sales data suggested.
The disparity did not affect leading conservative writers, such as former Fox News host BIll O’Reilly, whose books made the non-fiction list 17 times, more than anyone else, liberal or conservative. O’Reilly’s frequent co-author, Martin Dugard placed second, and conservative radio host Glenn Beck hit the third-place spot.
“It’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating,” former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told The Economist, commenting after his book, “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias” did not reach the Times’ bestseller list, despite enjoying heavy sales.
Lesser-known titles were especially affected, according to The Economist study, which found that “those that place in the bottom 10 of 25 slots on the Publishers Weekly bestselling non-fiction books list in a given week are 22 percentage points less likely to make it onto The New York Times list.”
The Times, in a statement, insisted the political views of authors and publishers “have absolutely no bearing on our rankings and are not a factor in how books are ranked on the lists.”
But The Economist debunked that by using several scenarios, including discovering a bias against political sales overall and another that included bulk title sales.
The publication noted that being on the bestseller list helps authors not only through book sales, but to generate speaking fees while negotiating better contracts in other book deals.
“A more transparent list would also be more useful,” the study noted. “If Alex Jones, a controversial far-right conspiracy theorist, was indeed the second-place bestselling author in America — as Bookscan says he was in August 2022, with a title that was omitted from The New York Times list — people should probably know that.”
