Save the cartoonist.

During the early 1870s, Tammany Hall political boss William Marcy Tweed had most of New York City's influential lawmakers, judges, police officers, and newspaper editors in his pocket, as he and his cronies robbed the city's treasury of perhaps $200 million.

Only The New York Times and Harper's Weekly dared challenge "Boss" Tweed in print. Harper's Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast helped turn public sentiment against Tweed by chronicling his abuses in a series of drawings.

In one of the most famous cartoons in history, Nast captured Tweed's head as a bag of money. In another, he drew Tweed and his lieutenants in a circle pointing to one another in response to the question: "Who Stole the People's Money?" After seeing that particular cartoon Tweed reportedly blustered: "I don't care what they print about me. Most of my constituents can't read. But them damn pictures!"

To silence Nast, Tweed canceled the city's textbook contract with Harper and Sons, which published Harper's Weekly. When that didn't deter Nast, Tweed tried intimidation and bribery, but the cartoons kept coming.

Eventually Tweed was arrested and sent to jail. And Nast -- with the support of his editor -- did for editorial cartooning what the Watergate scandal would do for investigative reporting a century later. Editors began hiring their own cartoonists, and more and more corrupt politicians found themselves muttering Tweed's words.

Cartoonists and their drawings have left distinct images on the American landscape since the founding of the country:

Benjamin Franklin drew a segmented snake with the words, "Join, or Die," to rally colonists during the French and Indian War. Richard Outcault's comic strip, "Yellow Kid," captured the abuses of industrialization at the turn of the 20th century.

In the 1950s, The Washington Post's Herbert Block, or Herblock as he signs his drawings, coined the phrase "McCarthyism" to represent the era's anti-Communist hysteria.

During the 2000 presidential election, cartoonists got closer to capturing the absurdity of the campaign than reporters, columnists, or editorial writers.

In early April, I organized a symposium called "It's a Draw: Political Cartoonists Reflect on the 2000 Presidential Election," at the College of Charleston campus in South Carolina. Two of the participating cartoonists -- Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader and Clay Bennett of The Christian Science Monitor -- lamented the decline of editorial cartooning in America. Cartoonists like Pett and Bennett blame staff cuts associated with the stagnant newspaper industry and overly cautious editors who don't want to run the risk of offending politicians, advertisers, or readers.

Most newspapers opt for publishing relatively generic syndicated cartoons. They are cheaper and generate fewer phone calls than cartoons about local issues. This is symptomatic of the foundering newspaper industry; and not using local cartoons reflects a weakness in the newspapers traditional watchdog function.

If editors want to better fulfill the newspaper's function in society or even if they just want to sell more newspapers, they should find ways to make their phones ring more and not less. Editorial cartoons accomplish both things.

Most editors are former reporters, who are trained to be literal and objective. By contrast, cartoons are neither literal nor objective. Too many editors, it seems, are irony-proof, perhaps causing them to grossly underestimate the value of humor, satire, and visual commentary.

"The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly," wrote E.B. White several decades ago. "It decorates its serious artists with laurels and its wags with Brussels sprouts. It feels that if a thing is funny it can be presumed to be something less than great, because if it were truly great it would be wholly serious."

Editors believe editorial cartoons have some value, or else why do they run syndicated cartoons on their editorial and on their op-ed pages every day? Their readership studies tell them editorial cartoons are popular with readers and, in fact, bring readers to the editorial pages who normally wouldn't go there. And finally, it is obvious that cartoons contribute to political commentary.

Why then don't editors hire their own cartoonist? Because editorial cartoons make editors as squeamish as they do disingenuous politicians. Even newspapers with staff cartoonists rarely give their cartoonists the same freedom they do editorial writers or columnists.

Newspapers -- such as The New York Times -- pride themselves on their hard-hitting editorials and columns. But this courageous attitude does not translate to editorial cartoons -- the most extreme form of expression in the newspaper. Instead of publishing staff-drawn cartoons with strong messages, the Times runs syndicated drawings that are little more than jokes of the day. The Times' policy on editorial cartoons is patronizing and hypocritical.

Of 1,500 daily newspapers, perhaps 90 have their own full-time cartoonist on staff, down from about 150 in 1980. Newspaper editors contend that cartoonists are luxuries they can't afford. Yet they fill their newsrooms with dozens of editorial writers, reporters, artists, photographers, copy editors, and mid-level editors. Why not just one cartoonist?

A lot of editors believe that allowing staff artists to draw occasional cartoons is the same as having your own cartoonist. Wrong again. Unless you believe there's no difference between substitute teachers and full-time teachers or part-time employees and full-time employees, in general.

There are other reasons (none particularly good) why editors give cartoonists the Rodney Dangerfield treatment.

I have had editors tell me that they're concerned that editorial cartoons are libel risks. Under the First Amendment, however, the editorial cartoon has as close to absolute protection as anything in the newspaper. The First Amendment doesn't exist so that we can freely praise our public officials; it exists so we can freely criticize our public officials. And no one serves the role of government critic like editorial cartoonists do. If editors continue to ignore this, they will succeed where "Boss" Tweed failed.

Chris Lamb is an associate professor of communication at the College Of Charleston. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the limits of political cartoons in the United States.