[2] Broder began working as a journalist while pursuing his master's degree, serving as editor of The Chicago Maroon[8] and later at the Hyde Park Herald.

In 1953 Broder reported for The Pantagraph in Bloomington, Illinois, covering Livingston and Woodford counties in the central part of the state.

In 1960 Broder joined The Washington Star as a junior political writer covering the presidential election that year between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

After 18 months at The New York Times, Broder moved to The Washington Post, where he would remain for over 40 years, beginning as a reporter and weekly op-ed contributor.

The longtime columnist was informally known as the dean of the Washington press corps and the "unofficial chairman of the board" by national political writers.

In his Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech, Broder said: Instead of promising "All the News That's Fit to Print," I would like to see us say—over and over until the point has been made—that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours—distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour.

[16]For many years Broder appeared on Washington Week, Meet the Press, and other network television and radio[17] news programs.

[citation needed] In 2001 Broder became a lecturer at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism while continuing to write full-time at The Washington Post.

Writing for Slate, Timothy Noah found Broder's attempts to merge national affairs with summertime reflections "mind-bendingly dull."

Writing in the Washington City Paper, Jack Shafer felt that Broder managed to merge "the cosmic and common in a stupefying slop of prose.

More recently, Broder was included in former Post columnist Dave Kindred's 2010 book on the paper's struggles in the changing media landscape: Morning Miracle: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life.