The team of Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) is crying foul as the New York Times blocks her book from appearing on its bestseller list while the senator is up for re-election despite having sold more copies than other books on the list.
McSally’s latest book Dare to Fly: Simple Lessons in Never Giving Up, sold, according to the publisher Harper Collins, 10,000 hardcover copies, 400 e-books, and 300 digital audiobooks. That is significantly more than the Times’ lowest-ranked book on its top 15 nonfiction bestsellers list, My Vanishing Country written by CNN contributor and Democrat Bakari Sellers and published by Amistad. Sellers’ book sold 2,200 copies, per BookScan data as reported by Harper Collins. The highest-ranking book on the list, Untamed by activist Glennon Doyle, sold 38,100 copies.
But the fact that McSally’s book, according to BookScan sales data collected by Nielsen and reported by Harper Collins, sold nearly five times as many as the lowest-ranked book on the newspaper’s bestseller list and somehow did not make the cut has the senator’s team raising concerns of “political bias.”
“This is a clear indication of political bias by the New York Times, including on their bestseller list a book that sold 2,200 copies while omitting Senator McSally’s book, ‘Dare to Fly’ which had 10,700 in sales,” McSally spokesman Eric Bearse told Breitbart News. “The inclusion of My Vanishing Country on the list is symbolic of the Times’ vanishing credibility. Senator McSally’s inspirational, pioneering story earned its place on the list. The Times’ record of discrimination against conservative authors like Senator Cruz, Donald Trump, Jr., and now Senator McSally, shows their list is embedded with bias.”
Times spokeswomen Eileen Murphy and Danielle Rhoades-Ha did not respond to Breitbart News’s requests for comment in response to McSally’s team.
McSally, who faces a tough re-election bid against Democrat Mark Kelly in Arizona, is just the latest in a long line of conservatives and Republicans who have seen their books blocked from the once-prestigious New York Times bestseller listing.
Recent books from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump, Jr., have also had issues with the Times listings. Cruz in 2015 was blocked from the bestseller list, according to Politico. Cruz sold more copies in that timeframe in which his 2015 autobiography was released than most other books on the list, but Murphy—the Times spokeswoman—said the Times’ bestseller list had other criteria than sheer numbers of books sold.
“We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold,” Murphy told Politico about the Cruz omission. “This book didn’t meet that standard this week.”
When Trump, Jr., topped the list with his book last year, the Times included what the Guardian described as a “dagger beside the book to indicate that ‘some retailers report receiving bulk orders.’”
What’s more, conservative publisher Regnery Publishing announced in 2017 it was cutting ties with the Times over such political bias on the newspaper’s bestseller list.
Regnery’s publisher Marji Ross wrote in a 2017 letter explaining her organization’s decision to cut ties with the New York Times bestseller list because the newspaper is cooking the books to push leftist books and authors and depress conservative books and authors.
“Increasingly, it appears that the Times has gathered book sale data in a manner which prioritizes liberal-themed books over conservative books and authors,” Ross wrote. “The net result has been a bestseller list that has increasingly become less relevant to the Regnery audience, and less reflective of which books are actually selling best in the country, regardless of one’s political persuasion.”
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