How do you promote a slick piece of GOPaganda, bash your arch-enemy, the New York Times, and manipulate an incompetent and credulous media that you DON’T own (yet) into carrying your (sewer) water for you?
Easy: Call up Dylan Byers at Politico.
Amazon: ‘No evidence’ of bulk sales for Ted Cruz book
Dylan Byers / PoliticoThe New York Times’ refusal to put Ted Cruz’s memoir on its bestseller list is once again being called into question — this time by Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the country. — On Sunday, an Amazon spokesperson told …
This is, of course, the followup to the hilarious “HarperCollins disputes N.Y. Times on Ted Cruz book: ‘No evidence of bulk sales’ By DYLAN BYERS 7/10/15 2:10 PM EDT” article, in which the mice were exonerated by the mice for any depredations of the cheese factory they were guarding.
Kind of like “Bill Cosby refutes allegations of accusers, releasing statement that no evidence has been found.”
Would anyone believe this statement:
“I have investigated myself and found
no evidence of my doing what I am
accused of” ???
Sure, Cosby WOULD say that. But is he credible? HarperCollins, Cruz’s publisher, is owned lock, stock and fallow [sic] by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp print entity. Wikipedia [emphasis added]:
In 1989, Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the publisher was combined with Harper & Row, which NewsCorp had acquired two years earlier. In addition to the simplified and merged name, the logo for HarperCollins was derived from the torch logo for Harper and Row, and the fountain logo for Collins, which were combined into a stylized set of flames atop waves.
In 1999, News Corporation purchased the Hearst Book Group, consisting of William Morrow & Company and Avon Books. These imprints are now published under the rubric of HarperCollins.
HarperCollins bought educational publisher Letts and Lonsdale in March 2010.
In 2011, HarperCollins announced they had agreed to acquire the publisher Thomas Nelson. The purchase was completed on July 11, 2012, with an announcement that Thomas Nelson would operate independently given the position it has in Christian book publishing.
Yeah. Hopefully Nelson will publish upwind from HarperCollins other (endless) acquisitions.
But, seriously, WHAT KIND OF AWFUL reporter would accept the wolf’s report on who’s to blame for the tragedy in the henhouse?
And yet, that’s what Byers has done. Not just once, but in the latest iteration, he called a mucky-muck at Amazon on a SUNDAY, who said they don’t have evidence of bulk buys … at AMAZON.
Less “Sherlock” than “Sheer Luck.”
So what? Bulk buys ofttimes take place at significant discounts and bulk rates — to Conservative Book Clubs, as was a standard scam of Tom Phillips’ imprints from at least 1993 (when he bought Regnery) at least until he sold Regnery Press, (and Human Events, RedState, American Spectator) etcetera etcetera in January 2014 to Salem Communications, now Salem Media Group. Some might recall that Regnery authors SUED for alleged loss of royalties through these “book club” sales. The lawsuit was sent to arbitration and lost on all counts.
OK: What does AMAZON know about this?
Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. They base their bestseller lists on their sales. And that was, at best, what the AMAZON employee Dylan Byers called on Sunday, knew.
So, again, you have a non-credible to IN-credible “defense” of Ted Cruz’s book by supposedly objective “journalist” Dylan Byers of Politico repeated as red meat for the standard blogswarm by the Usual Suspects:
Click for the Memeorandum page
The only real “mainstream” press to play the “meetoo” game is a business reporter at CNN, who writes, INcredibly:
Amazon sides with Ted Cruz in bestseller fight with New York Times*
By Tom Kludt
CNN Business
CNNMoney (New York) July 13, 2015: 1:47 PM ET
[* Exceptionally BAD headline.]
Amazon denied Monday that “bulk purchases” were fueling sales of Ted Cruz’s new book, but the New York Times said it’s not budging in its decision to exclude the senator’s memoir from its bestseller list. Amazon said in a statement that it has found “no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity in our sales data” for Cruz’s recently released book “A Time for Truth.” …
Amazon didn’t “side” with anybody. And they didn’t DENY anything in the New York Times’ stated reasons. No: making such a statement is poor reporting, p0or thinking, and ought to get this joker reprimanded by any competent newsroom editor.
Oh NO! Ted Cruz is left off the bestseller list! EVIL LIBERULZ!
But you know CNN these daze [sic].
They reported that they haven’t seen any bulk sales. Again, to use the Cosby analogy, this is tantamount to Mrs. Cosby saying that she didn’t see any drugging and rapes. No one in their right mind would accept THAT argument at face value, and yet, Politico and CNN do.
WTF?
Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy on Monday said the newspaper is standing by its decision to keep “A Time for Truth” off its bestseller list…. Murphy said in an email…. “The notion that we would manipulate the bestseller list to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous,” she said.
And the CNN “let’s you and him fight” reporter concludes with the Cruz campaign’s little threat:
Rick Tyler, Cruz’s campaign spokesman, dismissed the Times’ claim last week as a “blatant falsehood.”
He said the newspaper, long the object of conservative scorn, is “presumably embarrassed by having their obvious partisan bias called out.” And “We call on the Times, release your so-called ‘evidence,'” Tyler said in a statement on Friday.
Now, the New York Times has a poor track record of standing up to Right Wing bullying. We’ll see what happens here.
After all, John Hinderaker, the Koch Brothers’ favorite blogger (and an employee via his law firm) hits on the Times TWICE, even though the New York Times has been covering the national book scene longer than Politico, Amazon, CNN and Murdoch’s American presence PUT TOGETHER.
And these absurd, straw man accusations of “bias” are selling books AND bashing the NYT at the same time. Win-win for Murdoch, as they say.
(As an aside: One of the other BESTSELLER lists mentioned by both Murdoch media water-carrier Byers and the CNN stooge is the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. Nobody bothers mentioning that the WSJ is owned by Murdoch as well, and is a competitor of the New York Times. The self-serving interests of the Murdoch empire are apparent to any objective or competent observer, but seem to have entirely eluded Dylan Byers and Tom Kludt. Ah, American journalism, how far you have fallen.)
Here’s the recap for the easily distracted: Dylan Byers pushes HarperCollins/Ted Cruz’s self-serving meme that the New York Times (liberals! GASP!) is keeping his A Time For Truth book off the bestseller charts because (implicitly) they hate conservatives. Never mind that Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have “routinely ranked high on our lists.” No: the BS meme that the biased Right is not biased and the Left is ALWAYS biased is once more conditioned into the drooling Pavlovian subjects. Byers’ evidence is laughable to virtually any bright fifth grader who’s ever read Encyclopedia Brown stories, but that lets out 99% of Murdoch’s base audience.
The absurd argument (HarperCollins says there is no manipulation. AMAZON says they’re not getting any “bulk sales,” but the nature of such sales means that AMAZON would almost NEVER be the source of such sales! And the “refutation” comes from Byers calling an Amazon employee on a Sunday) is made and then picked up, uncritically (that’s an UNDERSTATEMENT) by a CNN Business “reporter.”
The Usual Suspects behind a gazillion fraudulent media manipulations jump on it, and it’s suddenly a “story.” Even though its basis is tissue thin. The New York Times is then attacked and the credulous are barraged with fake publicity for this “truth” book, goosing sales, since any “controversy” always helps to sell books.
The entire story is suspiciously corrupt and my opinion of Politico can’t get any worse, so there no change there. But it stinks on ice. And will any US blog or news outlet do other than IGNORE this vile media manipulation?
I leave you to answer THAT question, gentle reader.
More Media Manipulation Money to Murdoch’s Minions
And, talk about burying the lede! This is the penultimate paragraph of Byers’ latest incredibly poor and complicit reporting which actually tells us all that we REALLY need to know:
“It’s been a good week and a half with wall-to-wall coverage of the book, and yes, this latest unfortunate news courtesy of the New York Times is a chance to get yet more attention and drive readers to Senator Cruz’s book,” Keith Urbahn, the book’s literary agent, said last week. “This controversy is already helping sales.”
Unfortunate for the New York Times, he means. Over at RupertWorld, they’re probably dancing in the halls.
All for a book oxymoronically entitled A Time For Truth.
Yeah. But this ain’t the time, I guess.
Courage.
Hart Williams is the author of Reality 101 – Political Self Defense for Progressives* This is cross-posted from his vorpal sword.
* I do not know WHY The Moderate Voice turns my link into a dreadful hash with its own URL at the beginning of a meaningless bit of code. The book is HERE:
http:/www.amazon.com/dp/B00UXZXM3O If there is a problem — and lord knows, there probably is — copy the URL and paste it in your browser. Jeepers.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.