Opinion: The Letters Top Five
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Reader reaction to President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to invite Saddleback Church leader Rick Warren to speak at the Inauguration brought in more mail to The Times than any other topic last week.
During the week ending Dec. 27, The Times received 534 usable letters, 257 of which were in our Top Five Topics.
- Rick Warren: 88 letters;
- Proposition 8, including responses to California AG Jerry Brown’s about-face on the initiative: 68 letters;
- California’s ongoing budget insanity: 50 letters;
- Bush, Iraq and the shoe: 29 letters; and
- This Joel Stein column about Jews in Hollywood: 22 letters.
How the Top Five is tabulated: 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 and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not counted in the chart.