Opinion: The Letters Top Five
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Letters to the editor reacting to Barack Obama’s first week in office lead the Top Five -- but not by much.
During the week ending Jan. 31, The Times received 709 usable letters, 289 of which were in our Top Five Topics.
- Obama’s first week: 81 letters, including letters responding to the appointments of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Middle East envoy George Mitchell;
- Gaza: 63 letters;
- Economic stimulus: 61 letters, including reactions to this story about the Republican response to Obama’s $825 billion proposal;
- Billy the elephant: 48 letters, most urging the City Council not to continue work on the L.A. Zoo’s Pachyderm Forest (letters reacting to the Council’s vote to move forward on construction will be included in next week’s count); and
- California’s budget: 36 letters about painful cuts to the state’s budget.
Honorable mention: we also received 29 letters responding to this Robert Reich Op-Ed about unions, 27 letters responding to this Mickey Edwards Op-Ed about Ronald Reagan and today’s GOP, and 25 letters responding to the first set of news stories about the octuplets born in Bellflower.
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.