Political Cartoons No Longer Front and Center

Political cartoons remain, but they lost front page power and heft long ago, says U.S. News & World Report. Cartoonists like Thomas Nast could once sway elections—Ulysses S. Grant credited Nast's pencil to helping him win the presidency—but the ranks of full-time pen-and-paper satirists have thinned to less than 100 today, compared to 2,000 a century ago.

The rise of photography and television in the 20th century spelled doom for most newspaper and magazine cartoonists, but in their Victorian heyday they wielded unique power. "Nast was working in a media environment with virtually no other images,” said Economist cartoonist Kevin Kallaugher. (More editorial cartoons stories.)