Before the idea of minority rights gained traction at the Paris Peace Conference, numerous editorials appeared in Istanbul newspapers on the subject of Ottoman ethnic and religious minorities (akalliyetler). The pervasiveness of the minority question in the press was tied to debates on the future composition of the state in the aftermath of nearly a decade of continuous warfare and the total destruction of the prewar social order. Arguments about minorities were intertwined with an understanding of how Ottoman institutions and legal structures had operated from the 1880s through the First World War—especially those imposed by European states that had limited state sovereignty. Newspaper editors and commentators focused on two types of legal and administrative exception that had operated in the prewar empire: the autonomous or “exceptional provinces” (eyalat-ı mümtaze) and non-Muslim “privileges” (imtiyazat). While the postwar Ottoman government publicly endorsed the extension of administrative autonomy to the Arab provinces on the model of the pre-war “exceptional provinces,” the status of special rights for non-Muslims was far more contentious. This paper examines some of the threads of the early debates on the minority question in the Ottoman Turkish press, from the beginning of the Armistice in late October of 1918, through the Greek invasion and occupation of İzmir/Smyrna in May of 1919. It focuses on the liberal opposition to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who many liberals blamed for the general depredations of the war, and especially for the murder and destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community. Writing under the shadow of genocide, Ottoman liberals grappled with the question of how rebuild the empire and remake the body politic in the aftermath of total war and, at the same time, struggled with devising ways to limit European interference in Ottoman affairs. As it became clear that Allies would partition the empire, Istanbul intellectuals abandoned any commitment to special rights for non-Muslims and the empire itself. This paper shows how debates in the press closely followed those in Paris and will provide part of the Istanbul and Paris context for panel’s larger Tehlirian story.