Gosnell ‘serial killer’ abortion book is a bestseller
But the New York Times snubs it, revealing that the Times bestseller list is a matter of opinion.
And here we thought all this time that books made that prestigious list by actually being current bestsellers, by the numbers.
Not so, it turns out.
Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer is a new blockbuster exposé by filmmakers and investigative journalists Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, the latest compelling project by the pair known for dogged research and solid documentation in their solid, straightforward documentaries and now this book. It sold out of Amazon and Barnes & Noble in three days, and outsold all but three nonfiction hardcover titles.
But the New York Times refused to include Gosnell on their nonfiction “Print Hardcover Best Sellers” list. Which makes it de facto dishonest about that list actually being ‘Best Sellers’.
Regnery Publishing claimed the Times ‘blatantly snubbed the pro-life book from the bestseller list’, though it certainly earned its place there.
When Gosnell released on January 24, it rose to #3 on Amazon’s best seller list of all book and was the #1 ‘Hot New Release’. While Gosnell landed on the “Combined Print & E-Book Best Sellers” list (at #13), the Times ignored the real sales numbers and refused to correctly list Gosnell as the 4th bestselling nonfiction title. ‘
The book reached that mark without any so-called ‘mainstream media’ attention—no reviews, no features, no author interviews. Gosnell’s meteoric success, and the New York Times’ coverup of that success, mirrors what happened when the story first broke about the Pennsylvania abortionist’s “House of Horrors’, dubbed that by authorities when they raided the ‘clinic’ as an alleged ‘pill mill’ and discovered atrocities.
I covered it here many times, including the Grand Jury Report, after they visited the site wearing Hazmat suits for protection from any contact with the wretched filth and human decay inside the place. One of the chapters of that report is titled ‘How Did This Go On So Long?’, which Phelim and Ann answer with details and documentation in the book and upcoming film on Gosnell.
Their projects reveal how authorities astoundingly looked the other way when this former back alley abortionist ran an operation in their territory that broke laws and took more lives than America’s most notorious serial killers put together.
When the Gosnell case finally went to trial, it was ignored by media. Kirsten Powers called them out on that, as did other journalists and a Twitter campaign that ran a photo of an empty media section in the courtroom. The lack of media coverage continues now, with this book of revelations people need to read, especially those who may be considering abortion and those who work in the industry.
Ann McElhinney, co-author of Gosnell, says, “This is shocking that the cover-up of the Gosnell story is continuing even after the mainstream media were so criticized for failing to cover the trial.
“It’s clear that this is a blatant fake list in a fake news newspaper. It’s not only an insult to the people who have bought this book, but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”
McElhinney rightly adds, “The media doesn’t want this story to see the light of day because it shines a negative light on abortion.”
This has happened before with the Times’ bestseller list and been reported before, when it excluded outstanding Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel’s book (ironically, as this article notes), The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech.
NewsBusters posted on the Gosnell omission from the list, including an explanation someone at the Times gave in response to the Media Research Center’s news site.
A New York Times representative defended the outlet’s methodology Tuesday in a comment to MRC Culture:
“The Times’s best-seller lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”
She added, “That process is not influenced in any way by the content of a book, or by pressure from publishers or book sellers.”
Ann and Phelim don’t buy that disclaimer, nor does their publisher, with so many people buying the book it sold out on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books A Million in the first week. I talked with each of them on radio last week, both passionate authors, filmmakers, journalists and storytellers. They just want to know the truth about the most important events and news stories of our times, stories impacting the lives of so many people in communities and across the nation.
Crime stories are big sellers as television series, drama or horror stories in film, and fiction novels. This is a real life one, possibly flagging us to the possibility of other Gosnells out there doing these same things undetected or unreported right now, in other states in the country.
While the New York Times and other big media outlets continue to ignore Gosnell, the sales of this new book clearly prove that the American people want to know the truth.
