Former LAT editor writes letter

Bill Thomas was the top editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1971 to 1989, most of the time with Otis Chandler as publisher. Today's Times runs a letter to the editor from Thomas defending the paper's final-week Schwarzenegger groping stories. A snippet:

The paper did not simply gather up stories of misbehavior and slap them into print. It worked hard to see if there was enough supporting data to take them seriously. Then it put them into the newspaper. It's too bad it was so late in the campaign, but it's clear these stories did take time to develop and check out. Ask yourself if it would have been more ethical, when they were judged ready for print, to hold them until after the election solely to avoid influencing the vote.

The letter writer just below Thomas on the page took the opposite view. He wrote that he's a liberal Democrat who cancelled his subscription and planned to vote for Schwarzenegger in protest of the stories.