Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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Letters reacting to the debate over the economic stimulus package led the Letters Top Five again this week.

During the week ending Feb. 7, The Times received a healthy 1,061 usable letters to the editor, 440 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Economic stimulus: 148 letters, following the continuing debate about a stimulus package;
• Octuplets: 97 letters;
• Tom Daschle: 89 letters, reacting to former majority leader’s withdrawal from consideration as secretary of Health and Human Services;
• Cardinal Mahony: 54 letters, reacting to this report and this report about a new investigation into the cardinal’s role in covering up past abuse cases; and
• Coyote trapper: 52 letters, mostly critical, reacting to this Column One about trapper Jimmie Rizzo.

Last week, we also received a high volumes of letters responding to the shutdown of The Times’ California section (50 letters) and to this Column One about UCLA student Karina De La Cruz (45 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 reflected in the chart.