「经济学人」Setting sales

Bestseller lists are supposed to reflect sales, not political ideology

People love lists. The 1,000 richest people, the 100 places to see before you die, the ten most-wanted fugitives; lists promise to make the chaos of life more manageable. Benjamin Franklin was a superfan, using lists to explain everything from the 13 virtues necessary to be successful to eight reasons to choose an older woman as a lover.

Since the first list of bestselling books was published in America in 1895, critiques have piled up like the stacks beside a bibliophile’s bed. In 1932 M. Lincoln Schuster, a co-founder of Simon & Schuster, a publisher, warned that: “The current procedure for compiling…the so-called ‘bestseller’ lists has led to many abuses.” He argued that cumulative sales should count. Currently, only “fastsellers” qualify, leaving the most popular book of all time, the Bible, out of the rankings.

More recently, people have been complaining of political bias. Critics, including Elon Musk, accuse the New York Times list, America’s most influential, of discriminating against conservative authors. The Economist has examined 12 years’ worth of data to see whether this is true. Our analysis suggests that it is.

We found that hardcover non-fiction books from conservative publishers are seven percentage points less likely to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list than you would expect from their sales as reported in Publishers Weekly, which uses a simple measure of purchases. Blockbusters by well-known conservatives, such as Bill O’Reilly, still manage to climb to the top of the Times’s rankings. But the bias against second-tier right-wing books is substantial. Titles from conservative publishers that rank in the bottom ten of Publishers Weekly’s top 25 hardcover list in a given week are 22 percentage points less likely to make it onto the Times’s.

The New York Times says that politics does not play any part in its rankings. It compiles them from thousands of “selling locations” and tries to screen out “bulk purchases”, which can be a sign of politicians or rich people buying lots of their own books in order to claim “bestseller” status. But the Times collects the data and adjusts it behind a veil of secrecy. Reading the newspaper’s 550-word explanation of its methodology is like trying to interpret the symbols in “The Da Vinci Code”.

The New York Times should strike a better balance between integrity and transparency. It is right to try to stop anyone gaming the system by, say, buying the appearance of popularity. But as faith in media objectivity wanes, transparency is the best way to ensure people’s trust. If the Times is shunning authors because it does not like them, it should say so. When Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist, wrote a book in 2022, Publishers Weekly ranked it as the number-two bestseller in its first week. The Times list omitted it entirely. If that was because the newspaper does not wish to lend publicity to a lying hate-monger, fair enough—but if so, it should make clear that its list is based on its values.

Another option would be to use a third party that tracks book sales, as do many newspapers, including the Washington Post. This gives readers a clearer picture of the data’s source and impartiality; data providers with no newsroom may suffer less from editorial bias.

Bestseller lists can be valuable. Knowing what other people are reading helps you understand what they are thinking, whether you agree with them or not. Subjective recommendations of good books are valuable, too. But it is important to know which is which. The New York Times should ask itself some hard questions—and start a to-do list.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Sorting the good from the popular”(June 13th 2024)

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