Politico, Amazon – and I guess the NYT, really – all help out Ted Cruz’s new book sales.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I have not read Ted Cruz’s A Time for Truth.  I generally do not buy partisan political books on my own, and I’m not on enough distribution lists to be routinely sent copies of the latest ones.  But this is looking worse and worse for the New York Times:

The New York Times’ refusal to put Ted Cruz’s memoir on its bestseller list is once again being called into question — this time by Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the country.

On Sunday, an Amazon spokesperson told the On Media blog that the company’s sales data showed no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity for the Texas senator’s memoir, casting further doubt on the Times’ claim that the book — “A Time For Truth” — had been omitted from its list because sales had been driven by “strategic bulk purchases.”

Ouch. I’m trying to figure out what the Old Gray Lady’s victory scenario here is, in fact. Was it to keep the book’s sales down?  Well, aside from the question of why the paper should care, it doesn’t seem to have happened. What has instead happened is that the Cruz campaign has spent the last week raising funds and generating favorable news coverage on this, which probably wouldn’t have happened if the NYT had simply entered A Time for Truth as #3 on their Nonfiction list. I’m not a big-shot newspaper guy or anything, but I don’t think that Arthur Sulzberger won this one.

And I’ll just end this with a shrug, because I can’t think of anything else really to say about the subject.

Moe Lane

5 thoughts on “Politico, Amazon – and I guess the NYT, really – all help out Ted Cruz’s new book sales.”

  1. As one man said, rabbits gonna rabbit.
    It was a dumb decision. It’s a fight they picked, that they didn’t have to, and can’t possibly win on the merits.
    But they did it.
    And they’ll almost certainly do it again.

  2. It’s the flip side of basing politics on feelings and “in-crowd” dynamics – visceral hatred leads to irrational counterproductive decisions.

    What the NYT and other elitists are terrified of is that the Republican presidential field has so many credible candidates that they may not be able to impose their choice of Republican nominee on the voters, but that one of “Them” might actually make a competitive run for the President.

  3. This is what pouting looks like. Anything more and it becomes a snit. Which would be drop-dead hilarious.

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