I spent the morning analyzing March 1 through March 17 letters to the editor. Not nearly enough for a real scientific study, but it became obvious some letter writers are so persistent that they have crowded out other writers.
It may be that letters are printed in the order that they are received. I didn't look up the specifics. Some people write more letters than they should. Sometimes one is too many.
Day after day, the letters sometimes reflect the latest news, but most of them are never-ending debates that have degenerated into literary pie fights. The kind of pie fight where you make pies from the remnants thrown at you days or weeks ago, then throw it back.
It's getting quite old, but for the excitement of seeing one's own letter published. It may erode into the situation with cable channel 5. The only people watching are the ones who submit the material.
I picked through the days of letters to the editor and counted specific words by using the Find/Replace function in Microsoft Word. There were 216 pages. Using the Find/Replace function, I replaced the text with identical words that were formatted in bold and underlined.
I turned on "Thumbnails" which is found under View>Thumbnails so I could see tiny versions of the pages. If I saw an area that had few bold underlined words, I would read it to find the main subject. Gradually I found the words that appeared to be of interest. I included some words that I thought should be frequent but to my surprise, were not.
I included the online comments that accompanied the letters as well. Someone thought themselves clever by spelling Obama with a zero instead of an O, so that spelling of the word became the first on the list when sorted alphabetically. (That's ASCII for you).
Voila!
| 0bama | 9 | |
| Abortion | 9 | |
| accountability | 5 | |
| afghanistan | 11 | |
| alderman | 1 | |
| aldermen | 2 | |
| American | 126 | |
| animal | 14 | |
| Ayers | 17 | |
| babies | 2 | |
| Beck | 2 | |
| beer | 3 | |
| Blagojevich | 12 | |
| booze | 1 | |
| bridges | 7 | |
| Burris | 14 | |
| Bush | 70 | |
| catholic | 8 | |
| children | 47 | |
| christian | 2 | |
| church | 2 | |
| Clinton | 23 | |
| communist | 10 | |
| community | 17 | |
| congress | 36 | |
| conservatives | 28 | |
| corruption | 5 | |
| debt | 11 | |
| Democrat | 60 | |
| disappointed | 7 | |
| drivers | 10 | |
| drunk | 20 | |
| earmark | 22 | |
| education | 22 | |
| Election | 35 | |
| employee | 24 | |
| enemy | 4 | |
| evil | 9 | |
| families | 23 | |
| Family | 28 | |
| FDR | 13 | |
| freedom | 27 | |
| God | 14 | |
| GOP | 31 | |
| government | 141 | |
| greed | 37 | |
| green | 11 | |
| Hannity | 3 | |
| health | 95 | |
| helmet | 39 | |
| Hoover | 11 | |
| horse slaughter | 6 | |
| human slaughter | 2 | |
| idiot | 4 | |
| insurance | 33 | |
| Iraq | 7 | |
| Israelis | 2 | |
| Jesus | 4 | |
| job | 93 | |
| Kennedy | 48 | |
| kill | 37 | |
| lawsuit | 1 | |
| legal | 56 | |
| liberals | 24 | |
| lied | 10 | |
| Limbaugh | 55 | |
| Lincoln | 39 | |
| liquor | 1 | |
| MacArthur Park | 5 | |
| McCain | 3 | |
| Medicaid | 19 | |
| Milford | 13 | |
| murder | 19 | |
| muslim | 0 | |
| Obama | 164 | |
| Pakistan | 1 | |
| Palestinians | 6 | |
| parent | 19 | |
| parents | 5 | |
| Pelosi | 7 | |
| police | 74 | |
| politician | 34 | |
| poor | 28 | |
| principles | 2 | |
| racist | 4 | |
| Reagan | 18 | |
| Reid | 3 | |
| Republican(s) | 65 | |
| rich | 64 | |
| roads | 20 | |
| Rush | 69 | |
| seatbelt | 3 | |
| smoking | 71 | |
| socialism | 23 | |
| socialist | 23 | |
| Springfield | 119 | |
| Steele | 21 | |
| stupid | 14 | |
| taverns | 6 | |
| tax | 325 | |
| taxes | 78 | |
| Ted Kennedy | 18 | |
| their base | 2 | |
| United States | 1 | |
| Washington | 22 | |
| WMD | 22 | |
| policies | 27 | |
| fail | 76 | |
| succeed | 13 | |
| Quinn | 8 | |
| America | 59 | |
| change | 34 | |
| consequently | 1 | |
| problem | 42 |
