Posted by PWalker
Not very long ago, there was a lot of talk about how sales of conservative books proved that liberalism was dead. Of course, that was before the wildly successful books by Bill and Hillary Clinton. I don’t know how many times I heard Ann Coulter say something like this:
The American people really have shown an enormous capacity to withstand the propaganda, especially in those media … where they are allowed to choose.
That is the Internet, radio and books, where conservatives absolutely dominate the list, dominate the top Internet sites, dominate talk radio. When Americans are given a choice, they choose conservatives. They’re not given a choice on ABC, NBC and CBS.
Well, today we found out that the conservative-leaning Chicago Sun-Times has been padding its circulation numbers.
Then came the dot-com bust, sapping away the paper’s classified employment advertising revenue. Then came the Sept. 11, 2001-fueled recession, causing what he described as a “horrendous drop” in ad dollars.
That’s when the cheating began in earnest.
Because circulation is counted by subtracting the number of unsold papers from the number of printed papers, the Sun-Times paid its distributors to not return unsold papers, artificially inflating circulation, an internal investigation revealed.
The same kind of thing has happened in the book world, where liberals and conservatives regularly trade accusations of padded sales due to bulk purchases. This site chronicles the sales battle between Bill O’Reilly and Hillary Clinton. Who won that one anyway?