The New York Times best-seller list is an unreliable source of bad math, especially when conservative authors do well. We’ve seen it before with David Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza. We’ve seen it with Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino. Now it’s happening to Michael Knowles and his new book Speechless. It hit #1 on Amazon.com on Friday. The Daily Wire reported:
Daily Wire host Michael Knowles’ new book, Speechless, sold nearly 18,000 copies in the week ending June 26, making it the top-selling nonfiction work in the country — far ahead of the second- and third-place books by Bill O’Reilly and Malcolm Gladwell, at nearly 13,000 and just over 9,000, respectively.
That’s according to Publishers Weekly, which gets its data from NPD BookScan, the industry’s most comprehensive count of book sales.
But you wouldn’t know it from reading The New York Times. The Times’ prestigious “bestseller list” does not include Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds at all in its list of the top 15 books for the same week.
Instead, it lists books like On Juneteenth, which according to BookScan sold only 4,774 copies that week, or just over a quarter as many as Knowles’ book. At #13, it lists Somebody’s Daughter, a “memoir about growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration” that does not appear anywhere in Publishers Weekly’s list of the top 25 nonfiction books.
Regnery executive Tom Spence was blunt. “The omission (once again) of the week’s bestselling book from the Times’ so-called bestseller list confirms that fact-free journalism has found a comfortable home at the former newspaper of record,” Spence told The Daily Wire.
When contacted by The Daily Wire, The New York Times explained that Knowles’ book sales “did not meet the standards for inclusion” among the books it considers to be “broadly popular” this past week.
While the Times has excluded the Knowles book, it continues to include Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 How to Be an Antiracist on its Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list, despite Kendi’s book not being among Publishers Weekly‘s list of the 25 top sellers. In fact, “How to Be an Antiracist” is not even among USA Today’s 100 best-selling books.
