GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz's book, "A Time for Truth" was listed behind former president Jimmy Carter's book "A Full Life" on The New York Times bestseller list. What's odd about this is that Cruz's book sold more copies than Carter's.
The Weekly Standard cites data from Bookscan showing that Cruz sold 8,814 books last week. Carter only sold 5,147. That means that Cruz sold 60% more books than Carter did. It makes no sense how Cruz could be 8th on the list behind Carter at 7th.
Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler slammed The New York Times in a statement:
"It’s no surprise that the liberal New York Times would prop up progressive Jimmy Carter over a conservative like Ted Cruz. But to do so in light of Cruz’s book selling 58 percent more copies last week than Carter’s reaffirms the Times’ questionable standards being used to determine its bestseller list. New York Times has a responsibility to its authors and readers to uphold fair standards, and we stand by our call for Public Editor Margaret Sullivan examine its methodology."
This comes off the heels of The New York Times initially refusing to put Cruz's book its bestseller list, claiming their bulk purchases were inflating Cruz's sale numbers. When Cruz's team and his publisher, HarperCollins, challenged the The New York Times to provide evidence, the paper caved and put the book on its list.
This is one of many examples of The New York Times' extensive history of bias. On Friday, Politico reported that The New York Times changed their coverage on Hillary's emails:
The paper initially reported that two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation "into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state."
That clause, which cast Clinton as the target of the potential criminal probe, was later changed: the inspectors general now were asking for an inquiry "into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state."
The Times also changed the headline of the story, from "Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email" to "Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account," reflecting a similar recasting of Clinton's possible role. The article's URL was also changed to reflect the new headline.
As of early Friday morning, the Times article contained no update, notification, clarification or correction regarding the changes made to the article.
The report goes onto say that the Times changed the article because the Clinton campaign complained about the coverage. That is not ethical journalism.
But the Times has an even more extensive history of bias. Take the case of Walter Duranty, a reporter who was basically a Stalin apologist. Columbia University professor Mark von Hagen did a review of Duranty's coverage and called for his Pulitzer Prize to be revoked:
In his report to The Times, Professor von Hagen described the coverage for which Mr. Duranty won the Pulitzer -- his writing in 1931, a year before the onset of the famine -- as a ''dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources.''
''That lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime,'' the professor wrote, ''was a disservice to the American readers of The New York Times and the liberal values they subscribe to and to the historical experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires and their struggle for a better life.''
Hoover research fellow Arnold Beichman compiled a list of Duranty's dispatches in which he flat-out denied the existence of Stalin's forced famine of the Ukranians, who were dying at a rate of 25,000 a day:
"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." --New York Times, August 23, 1933
"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18
"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." --New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13
All of which are lies. When Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story of the famine, and when Duranty was asked what he would write about it, his response was:
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
So Duranty knew the famine was occurring, yet wouldn't report on it because it was "an incident in the sweeping historical changes." To say that is unethical would be putting it mildly.
Beichman writes: (emphasis mine)
As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.
But most egregious of all, The New York Times suspected that Duranty was lying about the famine, and yet they did nothing about it.
In her exposé "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's man in Moscow," S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty's Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, "the recommendation fell by the wayside."
But Duranty was not the only New York Times reporter to be an apologist for a communist dictator. There was also a reporter named
Herbert Matthews who basically served as a propagandist for Fidel Castro. Matthews would write articles describing Castro as an "anti-communist" democratic revolutionary against then-dictator Fulgencio Batista. Even though Castro would later declare himself as a communist, Matthews never changed his mind, no matter how many people Castro jailed and executed: (emphasis mine):As late as 1969, he declared in his biography Fidel Castro that it was all a big misunderstanding. "Fidel, as I have said, uses communism," Matthews explained. "He finds it valuable but that is different from believing in the communist ideology." Matthews had little sympathy for those who disagreed. When Castro jailed one of his most popular commanders, Huber Matos, in 1959 for having the temerity to suggest there were too many communists in the government, Matthews simply shrugged: "A revolution is not a tea party." Matos would serve every day of his 20-year sentence.
Instead of callously brushing off Castro's ruthless dictatorship, Matthews should have done his job and reported the facts instead of letting himself be manipulated by Castro.
But perhaps the greatest blight on the Times coverage is the fact that they buried the Holocaust. This is what Laurel Leff, assistant professor at Northeastern School of Journalism, wrote about the Times coverage:
''You could have read the front page of The New York Times in 1939 and 1940,'' she wrote, ''without knowing that millions of Jews were being sent to Poland, imprisoned in ghettos, and dying of disease and starvation by the tens of thousands. You could have read the front page in 1941 without knowing that the Nazis were machine-gunning hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union.
''You could have read the front page in 1942 and not have known, until the last month, that the Germans were carrying out a plan to annihilate European Jewry. In 1943, you would have been told once that Jews from France, Belgium and the Netherlands were being sent to slaughterhouses in Poland and that more than half of the Jews of Europe were dead, but only in the context of a single story on a rally by Jewish groups that devoted more space to who had spoken than to who had died.
''In 1944, you would have learned from the front page of the existence of horrible places such as Maidanek and Auschwitz, but only inside the paper could you find that the victims were Jews. In 1945, [liberated] Dachau and Buchenwald were on the front page, but the Jews were buried inside.''
The reason for this was because The Times didn't want to be branded as a "Jewish newspaper," even though publisher Arthur Sulzberger was Jewish.
Choosing your coverage should not be based on what people may brand you. The fact that genocide was being committed against the Jews should have been front page news, and The Times blew it, which they even admit to.
So the fact that The New York Times decided to put Cruz's book behind Carter's, even though Cruz's book sold more copies, is just another example of The Times's long history of biased coverage.