Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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Does Obama’s proposed budget amount to class warfare against the rich? Times readers are sharply divided. Their mail on the subject led the Letters Top Five tally last week.

During the week ending March 7, The Times received 778 usable letters, 316 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• ‘Class warfare’: 140 letters, including mail about this news story and this Michael Hiltzik column, as well as letters responding to earlier letters on the subject;
• The Times’ new format: 84 letters, mostly angry, commenting on this newspaper’s decision to fold California into the main news section;
• Drug wars: 45 letters, including reactions to this editorial;
• March 3 election: a relatively paltry 26 letters, reacting to coverage of last week’s elections; and
• State-funded trips: 21 letters, responding to this investigative piece about California officials who charge what seem to be personal expenses to the state.

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.