The Economist released a study concluding that the highly-coveted New York Times Bestseller List is “politically biased” against conservative authors, and instead heavily favors left-wing authors.
As reported by Fox News, the magazine’s report determined that books from conservative publishers are at least 7% less likely to end up on the NYT Bestseller List than left-wing books with similar numbers of sales. The analysis also found that conservative books at the bottom 10 of the Publishers Weekly List are at least 22% less likely to even make it to the NYT list in the first place. The gap widens when the criteria is limited to just political books.
When it comes to nonfiction books, conservative titles are, on average, 2.3 spots lower than left-wing books with similar sales figures.
“Some may be tempted to cast aside such complaints as sour grapes, a popular delicacy in both publishing and politics,” The Economist noted in its report. “But a study by The Economist suggests that accusations of bias against conservative books may have merit.”
“It’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating,” said Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary under George W. Bush. His book, “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias,” was one example of a conservative book that ultimately did not make the NYT Bestseller List despite successful sales.
In response to the report, the New York Times issued a statement to The Economist: “The political views of authors or their publishers have absolutely no bearing on our rankings and are not a factor in how books are ranked on the lists.”
“There are a number of organizations with bestseller lists, each with different methodologies, so it is normal to see different rankings on each,” the notoriously left-wing paper continued.
The Economist study was carried out by compiling a list of 250 books that were released between June of 2012 and June of 2024 by companies that described themselves as conservative, and which made the Publishers Weekly list of top 25 hardcover nonfiction books for at least one week.
The Economist’s analysis also studied the effect of “bulk buying” designations on the rankings of individual books, but ultimately determined that “bulk sales do not appear to explain the bias that we observe in our data.” The report calculated that 53% of books from conservative publishing companies were marked as likely “bulk buys,” while just 10% of other books had the same designation. Even with bulk buying taken into account, conservative books still ranked lower than liberal books on average.
To this day, the New York Times keeps its methodology for creating the Bestseller List a secret from the public. The Economist called out the unnecessary secrecy, declaring that “a more transparent list would also be more useful.”