With Newspapers Dying Off Is the Political Cartoon That Far Behind?

The Washington Post takes a stand that political cartoons still matter.

From the article...

Stephen Hess is forever optimistic about the American editorial cartoon. He believes in the power of the pictorial commentary and speaks with a faith so unshakeable that one wonders whether he even realizes that there now seem to be more major-league baseball teams than there are major-league cartoonists working full time for a daily metropolitan newspaper. Has this scholar spent so many hours rummaging through musty archives — tracking his way back to what he calls the first American editorial cartoon, Benjamin Franklin’s “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake woodcut — that he hasn’t fully grasped just how many pink-slipped political cartoonists have been trod upon?

Hess can’t help it. Even as the marketplace changes, he believes in the creative and commercial ingenuity of the American political cartoonist.

“I’m not only trying to honor our political cartoonists,” Hess tells Comic Riffs, “but also to note the problems that exist now in editorial cartooning, which has been so tied in with daily print journalism. They’re in trouble. But at the same time — with the Internet — it could be a turning point.”