Opinion: The Letters Top Five: Tapegate!!

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns--more on that later--and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, from which she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper.

Last week The Times received 592 usable letters, 441 of which were in our Top Five Topics:

• The Presidential election, 199 letters;
• Other election, including letters about ballot propositions and potential election day glitches, 108 letters;
• The Economy, 65 letters;
• The Times’ new format (PDF file) 54 letters; and
• California’s budget crisis and its effect on the public schools, 15 letters.

At least, that’s one way to tally last week’s mailbag. If we suspended our rule about ignoring writing campaigns--and considered the 7,247-letter tsunami that crashed in after the McCain campaign complained that The Times was withholding a videotape of Barack Obama--the Top Five would look quite different (see chart, below.)

In some ways the Tapegate edition is less edifying than the official Top Five tally--in other ways, much more.

Why don’t we allow letter-writing campaigns on the Letters page or in the Letters Top Five count? First, they often don’t respond directly to Times coverage. Second, they usually spawn dozens of identical form letters, or semi-original letters drafted from prepared talking points. We receive mail riddled with notes such as ‘[INSERT YOUR NAME HERE]’ or ‘DON’T FORGET TO INCLUDE YOUR PHONE NUMBER, MANY NEWSPAPERS REQUIRE ONE!’ It doesn’t make for edifying reading.

Much of our Tapegate mail, too, was boilerplate material. What wasn’t, all too often, was clumsy in different and admittedly original, but unprintable, ways.

Many readers hoped we’d all get laid off; one said he wished we’d all get cancer. A few threatened violence. This offering was fairly typical:

At least he didn’t resort to cussin. We got a lot of that, too.