Loony toons: almost all political cartoons are on the left. Why should this be?

WHEN editorial cartoonist Wayne Stayskal retired from the Tampa Tribune last December, he left as one of his profession's most admired craftsmen. (He still draws for a syndicate.) For four decades, Stayskal's distinctive, loose style and razor-sharp wit have thrilled his admirers, enraged his political targets, and explored the frontiers of political satire. In short, Stayskal embodies those qualities that make a great newspaper cartoonist: He draws both blood and laughs.

And yet Wayne Stayskal has never won the newspaper industry's top honor: the Pulitzer Prize. For Stayskal made one crucial career mistake.

He is an unapologetic conservative.

As Stayskal's experience shows, "diversity"--today's media mantra--applies exclusively to race and gender. At a time when news organizations have aggressively diversified their newsrooms by hiring more minorities and women, they have also become much less politically diverse. This monolithically liberal press--and the intolerance it has bred--are affecting one of the most outspoken, dynamic art forms: the political cartoon.

In the last ten years, not a single conservative editorial cartoonist has won a Pulitzer. In fact, of 30 nominations for the prize during this time (three are sent to the Pulitzer board every year), only five have been of conservatives. And it's not because the judges eschew strong opinions. In fact, the Pulitzer trend (echoed in other industry contests) has been to reward the most provocatively left-wing cartoonists in the business. In the last five years, Joel Pett, Ann Telnaes, Clay Bennett, David Horsey, and Matt Davies--Stayskal's sharp-penned peers on the far left--have all won the award.

The Pulitzer establishment's bias has become so predictable that many conservative cartoonists simply refuse to submit for the prize. Award submissions, after all, require preparation and thought (and cost $50). Why waste one's time and money if the result is predetermined? Stayskal himself admits that he has not bothered to submit in recent years because of this prejudice.

Glenn McCoy of the Belleville (Mo.) News-Democrat, Stayskal's heir apparent as perhaps our funniest conservative cartoonist, also has stopped submitting. Explains McCoy: "Because of their obvious bias, I believe the Pulitzer is a totally illegitimate judge on the art of cartooning."

This current leftist dominance betrays a tradition of American cartooning that has historically been rich and varied in its political opinion. During the 20th century, for every Paul Conrad or Herb Block on the left, there was a Bruce Russell or Rube Goldberg on the right. Two- and three-newspaper cities fed readers' thirst for a variety of political views, and by the 1960s American editorial cartooning had matured into the best in the world. The creative fires were further stoked by Australian Pat Oliphant, who created a splash when he came to the U.S. in 1964 and treated Americans to comic scenes punctuated with biting, hilarious cutlines.

While Watergate unleashed a new generation of liberal activism in America's newsrooms, cartoonists--both conservative (Jeff MacNelly, Stayskal) and liberal (Mike Peters, Don Wright, Jim Borgman)--were creating funny, hard-hitting, visually playful cartoons in metro dailies across the land. This diverse stable of talent coincided with the presidencies of Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, and produced some of the best political art ever seen. Oliphant's Nixon, MacNelly's Carter, and Borgman's Reagan were sophisticated satires that visually defined their presidential targets.

In the 1990s, the increasingly partisan liberal press rallied behind an embattled Bill Clinton. Faced with "the Democrat's Nixon," newsrooms demonized Kenneth Starr, and, incredibly, gave Clinton more favorable press coverage than the prosecutor investigating him, according to the (non-partisan) Center for Media and Public Affairs. Cartoonists, less inclined to embrace the herd instinct than their newsroom peers, bucked the trend. Regardless of their politics, they smelled a snake-oil salesman--and Clinton proved to be a rich source of cartoon material.

But the emergence of a uniformly liberal press--accelerated by the 1990s consolidation of the industry into one-newspaper cities--was closing off opportunities for conservative satirists. The zesty menu of political cartoonists was being reduced to just one entree: liberal.

And that's a pity, because American politics has changed, and satire needs new blood.

Unlike their colleagues in America's newsrooms (Dan Rather: "When you start talking about a liberal agenda and all the 'liberal bias' in the media, I don't know what you're talking about"), editorial cartoonists are actually quite refreshing on the point of leftist bias. They, at least, admit it. And they wear it as a badge of honor. Liberalism is necessary, these cartoonists say, because a good cartoonist is anti-establishment; he is suspicious of power and authority. It's no wonder, they say, that the antiestablishment '60s bred such a fine generation of cartoonists.

But "the establishment" is a moving target. The notion that liberalism is antiestablishment is a nice illusion, but it's 30 years out of date. Today, the hypocritical, self-satisfied protectors of the status quo are on the left.

The welfare state has failed, with its liberal champions denying their legacy of fatherless, unemployable children and tattered inner cities. The civil-rights movement has become desperate quackery, abandoning Martin Luther King's ideal of "the content of their character" for a permanent racial spoils system. "Green" pols park their SUVs at the curb and then bloviate about America's wasteful consumption. And fantastically rich trial lawyers claim to represent the "little guy" while looting 50 percent of their clients' winnings.

Imagine the possibilities! This grotesque menagerie is as worthy of satire as the fat cats of Tammany Hall or the railroad barons of yore. But this kind of commentary requires a conservative's eye, and today's liberal press is blind to it.

There are simply too few opportunities for conservative cartoonists in today's newspapers. Where metropolitan areas once offered readers at least two newspapers and at least two editorial opinions, most of today's metro papers enjoy monopolistic control over their markets--and are predominantly liberal.

St. Louis, Memphis, Des Moines, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Louisville are typical examples of conservative, middle-American cities that have only one cartoonist: a liberal one. Even in metropolitan areas where two newspapers do exist--Philadelphia and Denver, for example--both newspapers boast just a liberal cartoonist. And in Chicago, the Tribune--which was once home to generations of America's finest conservative cartoonists, such as Joseph Parrish, Vaughn Shoemaker, MacNelly, and Stayskal--no longer even employs an editorial cartoonist.

In this parched landscape, the weeds of political correctness threaten to strangle cartoonists not only on the right, but also on the left. These left-wing newspaper monopolies are increasingly sensitive to special interests representing minorities, women, unions, and civil-liberties groups, and they see conservative cartoonists as a liability--as politically incorrect rabble-rousers who provoke letter-writing campaigns and canceled subscriptions. Liberal cartoonists have been largely free of these concerns, continuing to attack conservative special interests--the religious Right, gun-makers, industrial manufacturers--with impunity. But the left-wingers are looking over their shoulders, wondering how long it will be before publishers feel compelled to avoid all controversy. Liberal Ann Telnaes--one of only three nationally syndicated female cartoonists in the nation, and a Pulitzer Prize winner--strongly believes that a woman's point of view brings a different perspective to editorial cartoons, and is outspoken about the need for more women in cartooning. But if gender diversity makes editorial cartoons stronger, why not political diversity? A commitment to politically provocative and ideologically diverse cartoons would invigorate newspapers and ensure that editorial cartooning remains at the forefront of satirical invention.

If the newspaper industry wants to take that commitment seriously, it can get off to a relatively easy start: by recognizing Wayne Stayskal's brilliant career with the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Won't someone nominate him?

Mr. Payne is the editorial cartoonist for the Detroit Newsand a freelance writer.