Opinion: The Letters Top Five
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Last week, President Barack Obama led the Letters Top Five tally.
During the week ending Feb. 28, The Times received a relatively paltry 549 usable letters, 283 of which were in our Top Five Topics.
Maybe folks were busy looking for work. Maybe they spent their free time watching the Oscars or ‘American Idol.’ Whatever the case, they weren’t writing us.
- President Obama: 107 letters, including reactions to his speech to Congress and his administration’s work this week, including Hillary Clinton’s trip to Asia and Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s take on green energy;
- California’s budget: 90 letters. A budget may have finally passed, but many of you remain upset about the dysfunction in Sacramento;
- March 3 elections: 47 letters, responding to our endorsement of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for mayor as well as Police Chief William J. Bratton’s endorsement of Jack Weiss for city attorney;
- Death Row: 24 letters, reacting to this news story and this editorial; and
- Eric Holder: 15 letters, reacting to the attorney general’s comment that we are a ‘nation of cowards’ when it comes to discussing race.
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 reflected in the chart.