ANOTHER OLD GOP TRICK

We've known for a few years that the GOP and/or movement conservatives will artificially inflate the sales of wingnut books to impress the rubes. This has been going on since at least Nixon's time, according to NIXONLAND, page 596:

As that order was kicked down to staff for the difficult political problem of implementation, the Oval Office's malign attentions turned to the broader media problem. The president asked Chuck Colson if he'd read the new book The News Twisters by Edith Efron, an employee of one of his biggest backers, publisher Walter Annenberg. Colson replied that he had and found it a waste of time.

Wrong answer.

The News Twisters purported to be an objective study proving the networks followed "the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies," "actively slanting" against the "white middle-class majority" — 80 percent to 20, Efron concluded. To make the case, she videotaped hundreds of hours of broadcasts about the 1968 presidential election, marking each utterance for the side she took it to favor. Her judgments proved rather idiosyncratic. In heads-Iwin-tails-you-lose fashion, footage of Humphrey being heckled by antiwar protesters was scored as "supports demonstrators"; footage depicting Humphrey excoriating H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael and "extremists of the left and the right" was scored as "anti-conservative." A CBS report that Nixon was "warning his staff against overconfidence, but he himself hardly looks worried," was scored as suggesting Nixon "is a liar."

This, the president concluded, was literature. Nixon ordered Colson to get it on the bestseller list. Availing himself of $8,000 from the same funds that bought their gear for the Fielding break-in, Colson bought out bookstores' stock. Cartons of The News Twisters piled up in Howard Hunt's office—as it appeared on the bestseller lists beside LBJ's memoirs, B. E Skinner's Beyond Freedom & Dignity, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, and the sex manual Any Woman Can!