Sh%$ Like This Makes Me Feel Unreasonably Smug

It appears that the New York Times has finally had enough of right wing publishers manufacturing data for its best seller list, and it's first target is the Ted Crux Book A Time For Truth:

Conservatives are furious at the New York Times for refusing to allow Ted Cruz and his publisher, HarperCollins, to game the system and “earn” his way on to the bestseller list via “strategic bulk purchases.”

In an email to Politico’s Dylan Byers, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy explained why Cruz’s “A Time For Truth” was omitted, noting that the company has “uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold.”“In the case of this book,” she added, “the overwhelming preponderance of evidence was that sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases.”

Conservatives are complaining that “bulk purchases” should still count as sales:

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And while they might have ground to stand on there — if by “bulk purchases,” the Times meant “10,000 copies purchased to be sold at Walmart” — but the Times specified that it believes HarperCollins engaged in “strategic bulk purchases.” In essence, The Times accused Cruz’s publisher of trying to buy its way onto the bestseller list by having a firm like Result Source hire thousands of people across America to individually purchase a copy of “A Time For Truth,” in the hope that some of those retailers are on the secret list of booksellers who report their sales to the Times, or that the aggregate purchasers will simply be too high for the Times to ignore.

In other words, conservatives are upset that HarperCollins got caught trying to rig the system in order to make “A Time For Truth” a bestseller, though that’s not quite how they see it:

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Wingnut tears are salting my soup as we speak.