12.06.06 Cultural Snobbery & its Enablers

Reading this short article sure opened my eyes about the effects of ideology in the marketplace for ideas

Thomas DiLorenzo wrote:

"Shortly before his excellent book Bully Boy, a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, was published my friend Jim Powell emailed me that something called 'Publishers Weekly' had attempted a 'preemptive strike' on the book by slandering it on Amazon.com. The obvious objective of this attack was to try to stifle sales before the book was even released.

I had noticed this outfit before and thought it very odd that it often has the very first comments about newly-published books on Amazon.com and other book sites, yet the comments are all anonymous. Who are these people, and why do book sellers give them such a prominent place?

Searching the internet, I discovered that its anonymous 'reviews' (which are actually catty little diatribes) are distributed to hundreds of publishers, libraries, and booksellers. The editor-in-chief of this shadowy operation is one Sara Nelson, formerly of Glamour and Self magazines, those pinnacles of American intellectual rigor and serious scholarship.

It is well known that the commercial publishing industry in America, like universities, Hollywood, and so many other institutions, is almost totally dominated by liberals and leftists. So much so that it was newsworthy a few years ago when Random House established a division (Crown Forum) that would publish conservative books, as did a division of Penguin Publishing. Before that, only Regnery Publishing was known to publish conservative or libertarian books on a regular basis. So it was big news when, all of a sudden, there were three – out of hundreds – of commercial publishers that would not automatically censor manuscripts submitted by conservatives or libertarians."

Go figure! I wrote something along those lines myself on this blog a few days ago in re podcasts noting the snotty reaction non-mainstream culture critics express toward writings that conflict with their core beliefs, whether they make good points or not.