Demonstrating leftist bias at the New York Times is hardly a dog-bites-man story, but it is notable when the evidence is offered by The Economist, which is about as mainstream a media outlet as you can find. In a feature entitled “Is the New York Times Bestseller List Politically Biased?,” The Economist concludes with a firm Yes:
To determine whether such claims [of ideological bias] are fact or fiction, The Economist compiled 12 years’ worth of Bookscan data from Publishers Weekly and identified books by 12 publishers that describe themselves as politically to the right of centre. . .
We then built a statistical model to predict whether books would appear in the New York Times weekly “hardcover non-fiction” and “advice, how-to and miscellaneous” rankings in order to determine whether books by conservative publishers were included on these lists more or less often than their sales data would suggest.
We estimate that, on average, books by conservative publishers are seven percentage points less likely to make it onto New York Times weekly bestseller lists than books by other publishers with similar sales figures.
Here are the accompanying charts:
