Conservatives have been complaining for decades that The New York Times bestsellers list has been stacked against them.
You might wonder why they would care, but getting on the list can increase sales and prestige for any author, making future book deals even more lucrative.
Recently, Elon Musk called The New York Times "pure propaganda" in response to Bari Weiss lamenting the blacklisting.
With the richest man in the world calling out the paper, The Economist decided to do a study to see if the accusations were true.
The Economist compiled 12 years' worth of Bookscan data from Publishers Weekly and identified books by 12 publishers that describe themselves as politically to the right of centre. These include Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins that specialises in ‘conservative non-fiction', and Regnery Publishing, which bills itself as America's ‘leading publisher of conservative books'.
They found that no matter how you slice it and what algorithms you use, conservative books were way, way less likely to make the cut.
We estimate that, on average, books by conservative publishers are seven percentage points less likely to make it onto New York Times weekly bestseller lists than books by other publishers with similar sales figures.
Honestly, the most surprising thing about this whole study is that there are any conservative books on the list at all.
Seriously, this is the most unsurprising result of any study I've ever heard of, but I guess it's nice to know we're all not crazy!
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