A recent Syracuse University study determined that only 3.4 percent of journalists are Republicans. But it gets even worse for the right. One of those GOP journalists is not even real.

For the last 30 years, Mallard Fillmore has worked as a reporter for WFDR-TV Channel 3 in Washington, D.C.. Fillmore is a duck, the creation of award-winning cartoonist Bruce Tinsley. More extraordinary, Fillmore is a conservative. There are plenty of cartoon characters in the nation’s capital, but the combination of Fillmore’s politics and profession makes him a rara avis.

Fillmore debuted in the Charlottesville Daily Progress where Tinsley served as an editorial cartoonist. Both Tinsley and his creation were soon shown the door when the paper’s publisher did not appreciate a punchline about the National Endowment for the Arts. It was the first of many times Mallard’s mouth would get him canceled.

But Fillmore landed on his webbed feet in the pages of the ideologically sympatico Washington Times. It was there that he came to the attention of Jay Kennedy, cartoon editor of Hearst’s King Features Syndicate. Like most in his profession, Kennedy was politically liberal. But he was an editor first and recognized a good comic strip when it waddled up to him. On June 6, 1994, Mallard Fillmore began its national syndication and three decades later appears in nearly 400 newspapers.

The most conservative comic strip since Chester Gould retired from writing Dick Tracy, Fillmore continues to offer a fresh take on American culture and the liberals occupying its commanding heights. Its eponymous protagonist is surrounded by insufferable newsroom colleagues representing various leftwing archetypes. The strip takes aim at the fads and fashions du jour, leaving no vapid celebrity or hypocritical politician unscathed.

Some newspapers have chosen to run Fillmore on the editorial page rather than the comics page. This is probably correct. Fillmore is the visual representation of veteran journalist Uri Berliner’s recent account of life at the taxpayer-funded National Public Radio. Berliner and Tinsley have the same thesis—the North Korean Politburo has more ideological diversity than the average American newsroom and that has a deleterious effect on news quality.

Self-evident as that may be, saying such things is often not welcome. After 25 years of service, Berliner no longer works for NPR. And Fillmore is regularly dropped by newspapers due to content, once by 69 papers in a single day. Most political art becomes quickly dated. But Fillmore endures because its premise remains as relevant as ever.

The numerical disparity between the liberals and conservatives of the Fourth Estate frequently makes balanced news coverage dependent on the benevolence of liberal editors and publishers. Without Jay Kennedy, Fillmore would have been a dead duck long ago. But such benevolence in journalism might be even harder to find than conservatism. Ask Uri Berliner about NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher.

For most of its run, Fillmore was solely the work of Tinsley, who now shares a byline with fellow cartoonist Loren Fishman. Not much else has changed for the duck reporter over the last 30 years. His colleagues are as incorrigible as ever. His profession is still hostile to reform. But through it all Mallard Fillmore maintains a stiff upper beak. Unlike most things named after the 13^th president, Fillmore has survived the unrelenting assaults from left-wing pressure groups.

If every Republican journalist created a fictional alter ego, they would double in number. It would not be enough.