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It’s no secret that Kara Swisher has been trying to figure out how to take the Washington Post off Jeff Bezos’s hands, even though it’s not for sale and the billionaire seems unlikely to part with it any time soon. In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher, she details why she’s on this “quixotic mission”; laments the Post’s recent struggles, including Bezos’s latest editorial meddling; and shares some conversations she’s had with trusted advisers about her plan, the Post’s legacy and troubles, and why the paper should and must be saved. Below is her opening pitch.

Kara Swisher: I’m not peacocking … I’m not trying to shame Jeff, either. It’s neither a troll, nor a tale of business derring-do, though I certainly have the ability to raise the money needed. And I have a plan I think would help get the Post back on its feet.

But here’s the simple truth: This is a love story. So let me begin by telling you it, and I’ll keep it brief. I got my job at the Washington Post by calling the Metro editor and yelling about a story I had seen in the paper. I was covering the story from my college newspaper, which was at Georgetown University, and the Post did a terrible job of it. And I was angry because I loved the Washington Post, and I was disappointed that they did such a bad job. I got the Metro editor on the phone on my first try, and he invited me down to the Washington Post, which at the time was on 15th Street. So I jumped on the M2 bus and rode it down to the Post. And I walked into the Post newsroom for the very first time, and it was love at first sight.

I told the editor my problems that I had with what they had done and how angry I was. And he told me I was obnoxious. Well, I was, but he had let me down, and I said I could do a better job. Right then and there, he hired me as stringer for the Washington Post. And I wrote innumerable stories about the college I was going to. So many, that it got me into the graduate school of journalism at Columbia. I got my first job in journalism by being irritating, so why should I stop now?

Back to my career there, I later went on to work in the mail room, as night copy aide, as a news aide, an intern for “Style Plus,” a fill-in for the business section, which morphed into a reporting job including covering retail workplace issues, and ultimately being the first reporter to cover the nascent digital-services business in D.C. in the form of a small company in Vienna, Virginia, called AOL, America Online.

It was there I met many people who are now the richest and most powerful in the world. For the most part, they were scrappy entrepreneurs with only a germ of an idea, a difficult road, but lots of aggressive drive. That included Jeff Bezos, who I met in Seattle when I went to check out his start-up called Amazon in the 1990s. As I described him in my memoir, Burn Book, up in Seattle, a short and energetic man was lousy at hiding his wanting ambitions, masking them behind a genuinely infectious, maniacal laugh, a curiously baby-fat face, and an anodyne presentation of pleated khakis, sensible shoes, and a blue oxford shirt.

Still, from the start, I had no doubt that Jeff Bezos would eat my face off if that’s what he needed to do to get ahead. Feral, in fact, was the first word that jumped into my head when I met Bezos in the mid-1990s. He brought me to an industrial area near the airport, and I watched as he skittered around the warehouse like a frenetic mongoose. We talked a lot in those days, largely because he needed me to shine a light on his efforts at a very dicey time for Amazon. First when I was at the Post and then at The Wall Street Journal, where I went in 1997 as its first reporter specifically covering the internet. After a lot of ups and downs, Amazon soared on that mongoose energy.

Fast forward to 2013 when he suddenly, and a surprise to me, bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million. By then, it was struggling to deal with the digital age, and I was hopeful that Jeff’s innovative spirit and piles of money would save the paper. Even before Bezos came on the scene, I had been warning former Post owner Don Graham that print newspapers were done for.

Despite worries about the tech takeover of media, I hoped Jeff would fully embrace online journalism while holding true to the journalistic standards and ethics of the legacy paper. So I wrote an open letter to Bezos on my media start-up, AllThingsD, and offered some advice: “Don’t treat the Post like some precious thing that cannot be touched or changed. While you certainly should respect its vaunted traditions and hue to ethical standards, that does not mean it gets to stay as it is. That’s the big danger here, that you start acting like the steward of history rather than using the fantastic Washington Post brand to make some new history.”

And for the first decade of owning the company, he was a very good owner, trying all manner of updating tech and supporting the newsroom and hiring a really great editor named Marty Baron. It was not the glory days of Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham, but it was a solid effort, even if the paper always seemed to lag behind the New York Times. Mostly, he kept his mitts off, which was the right thing to do. He even quietly endured endless attacks from President Donald Trump in his first administration. Again, it was the right thing to do, and he was public about that commitment.

Here’s what he said to Axel Springer’s CEO, Mathias Döpfner, about his role at the Post back in 2018.

Jeff Bezos: As the owner of the Post, I know at times the Post is going to write stories that are going to make very powerful people very unhappy.

Mathias Döpfner: Are you upset if they’re writing critical stories about Amazon, which they do?

Bezos: No, no, I’m not upset at all. When I first bought the Post —

Döpfner: Would you ever interfere?

Bezos: Never.

Döpfner: No?

Bezos: Never. I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed I would turn bright red. And it is nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far … I just don’t want to. For me, it would feel icky. It would feel gross. It would be one of those things, when I’m 80 years old, I would be so unhappy with myself if I interfered. Why would I?

Döpfner: Yeah.

Bezos: I want that paper to be independent.

He went on to say that telling the newsroom what to do would be like taking controls from the pilots of a plane. But when the Trump circus left town and the inexorable decline of the traditional-media business accelerated, losses mounted, and Jeff started to make one bad move after another.

In 2023, after bringing in former Microsoft executive Patty Stonesifer, who was well liked at the Post despite having to preside over layoffs and buyouts, Bezos then shows Will Lewis to take over as the new CEO. Lewis had tried to be a media entrepreneur, emphasis on tried, and had been a former CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and before that, a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp back in the days of the U.K. phone-hacking scandal. And one of the first things he did after taking his job at the Post, after trashing the reporters for not wanting to change, which was entirely untrue and obnoxious, in not the good way, was apparently trying to kill a story about his own alleged involvement in that scandal. And when Lewis ousted then–executive editor Sally Buzbee, the first woman to serve in that role, newsroom morale plummeted.

Then last October, Bezos decided the Post would end a decadeslong practice and pulled the newsroom’s planned endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris. That Bezos himself made the decision, not Lewis, is according to the Post’s own reporting. While he certainly was within his rights to do so, the timing was curious and there was fallout. Three hundred thousand Post readers canceled their digital subscriptions in response. No surprise, a growing number of editors and reporters started leaving as newsroom morale plummeted once again. That included my wife, former opinion editor Amanda Katz.

And at the dawn of Trump 2.0, there have been other examples of the Post seeming to obey in advance. In January, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after she said opinion editor David Shipley rejected her cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech billionaires bending the knee before Trump. Last month, the Post pulled an ad deal that called on Trump to fire Elon Musk. And just in case that wasn’t enough, Bezos and many other tech billionaires paid a million dollars plus to yuck it up onstage with Trump during the inauguration. Jeff looked like a prop and a stooge.

Finally, last week, Bezos announced that the Post opinion section would be refocused to only publish pieces that are “in support and defense of personal liberties and free markets,” which in libertarian billionaire nincompoop speak roughly translates to “Personal liberties means doing whatever the fuck I want. Free markets means doing whatever the fuck I want.” Now, I love capitalism too, but what that means in practice is incomprehensible and really just dumb. That move essentially forced the resignation of the opinion editor, David Shipley, who declined, as Bezos noted, not to say “hell yes.” “Hell no” was the right response. That was a far cry from that 2018 interview:

Bezos: I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed I would turn bright red. And it is nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far … I just don’t want to. For me, it would feel icky. It would feel gross.

I don’t know if Bezos is now so comfortable with all this interference that he’s gotten over the ick factor, but the rest of us haven’t. As far as I’m concerned, he has killed the Post’s legacy of justice, fairness, commitment to the First Amendment, accountability, and epic badassery created by Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham. Here’s former Post reporter Martha Sherrill:

We were always asking more, and we’re pretending we didn’t know things that we maybe thought we knew. But at the same time, you had to kind of have the balls to put the story together.

The problem is that Bezos isn’t just any owner. He’s one of the top tech titans in the world, and his real business interests are in Amazon and Blue Origin and not the Post. Now, the biggest competitor to Blue Origin, Elon Musk, is working directly with Trump running DOGE, and I think Jeff wants some of that sweet, sweet government money. Owning an independent media company that is reporting on a presidency and administration that could make or break him, even if he was not such an embarrassing cheerleader, has become a clear conflict of interest.

I don’t want to buy the Washington Post to put it on a nostalgia shelf like some precious tchotchke. Even though the Post reportedly lost $100 million last year and about $77 million a year before, I believe there’s an opportunity here.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The rest of the episode is a wide-ranging discussion of the Washington Post’s past, present, and future among Kara and former Post writer Sally Quinn, media legend Tina Brown, reporter and critic Oliver Darcy, former Post national editor Cameron Barr, and others. Listen to it here.

This episode of On With Kara Swisher was produced by Nishat Kurwa, Cristian Castro Rossel, Kateri Jochum, Megan Cunnane, Lissa Soep, Megan Burney, and Kaelyn Lynch, with mixing by Fernando Arruda and theme music by Trackademics. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.