Broder adds that he believes Boyd is one of the most honest and fair reporters in Washington.
"He's totally independent," Broder says. "I have no idea what his politics may be, and I've known him for 30 years."
But in the past six years, politics have played a much smaller role in Boyd's reporting.
"The campaigns got to be less fun because the press corps got so swollen, you lost close contact with the candidate and his senior people," Boyd says.
When he began covering presidential campaigns, Boyd says he routinely got to talk with candidates and their senior supporters around the bars of New Hampshire.
"You'd get on the airplane with Goldwater, and maybe there'd be 20 reporters," Boyd says. "He'd come back and there was a chance to talk to you informally. T here was a sense of closeness that's kind of lost now in this monster corps."
Instead of a crew of 20 regulars, a serious presidential candidate today can expect three whole planes of reporters to follow in tow.
And so it was that Robert Skinner Boyd made a rather large leap in 1993. The veteran political reporter stepped down as Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau Chief to become its Washington science writer.
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