The bestseller battle between Sen. Ted Cruz and The New York Times is over: “A Time for Truth” is officially No. 7 on the newspaper’s list for second-week sales.
The Times kept the Texas Republican’s new book off of its coveted list last week over claims he was using bulk sales to game its system. Industry heavyweights Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Harper Collins all disputed the bulk sales allegations for roughly 12,000 copies of “A Time for Truth” sold in its first week of release.
Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said Wednesday that nothing changed pertaining its system for determining a bestseller.
“This week’s NYT best seller list was arrived at using the same process as last week’s — and the week before that,” Ms. Murphy wrote, Politico reported. “That process involves a careful analysis of data, and is not influenced in any way by the content of a book, or by pressure from publishers or book sellers.”
The Times does not disclose its method for tabulating books sales or determining if bulk sales are being used to skew its results.
Mr. Cruz, though, said public pressure played a role and called on the public editor of the paper to investigate.
“If you look at last week, they had 20 books on their list. My book, ’A Time for Truth,’ out-sold 18 of them,” he said Wednesday evening on Fox News’ “The Kelly File.” “And yet, they don’t want people to read the book … They left it off, and then an amazing thing happened.”
“Number one, they accused me of bulk sales. I said, ’That’s a lie. Either produce your evidence or apologize,’ ” he said. “Then my publisher, HarperCollins, came out and said, ’That’s a lie. We have all the sales data. There are no bulk purchases.’ But then Amazon and Barnes and Noble both came out and said that’s a lie.”
“So I’m glad The New York Times listed it; I appreciate their listing it,” he said. “But it seems to me there are a lot of conservative authors The New York Times discriminates against. There is a need for the public editor of The New York Times to investigate their methodology. They leveled a false charge at me that has been refuted publicly and if The New York Times, if they want to be credible journalists, the public editor needs to investigate their methodology, see if they’re discriminating against authors that they may have different political views from.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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