What are the prerequisites of a well-functioning public sphere? What are the relations between such a public sphere and “a democratic order”? What is the role and responsibility of journalism and journalists in this regard? These issues constitute a central tenet in the many columns written by one of Turkey’s all-time most prominent editors, columnists, and journalists, Abdi Ipekci (1929-1979) in the crucial decades of the 1960s and 1970s. In context of the history of journalism in Turkey, Ipekci is hailed as a person, who attempted to promote ethical standards, and encourage the conditions for practicing balanced and well-informed journalism in a country, where journalism has traditionally been in the form of media that served as mouthpiece for political and state elites. In the eyes of Ipekci, balanced – or objective – journalism was both about raising journalists’ own ethical standards with regard to reporting about various ‘others’, as well as about developing a ‘democratic order’ that buttresses the possibility to perform independent journalism. Ipekci’s columns show a clear and consistent engagement with the issue of journalism ethics, as well as with how to develop and maintain a legal framework under which the possibility for freedom of expression and dialogue between various public actors is secured, and where autonomous media are protected. He thus came across as highly wary of the alterations in the legal framework, including the 1961 constitution, after the military intervention March 12, 1971, which led to restrictions with regard to freedom of expression, imprisonment of media workers, and an undermining of the autonomy of Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) that the 1961 constitution had paved the way for. In fact, the March 12, 1971 intervention is often emphasized by journalists and public intellectuals, who were active in the 1960s and 1970s, as a turning point, in the sense that it foreboded the end of a relatively speaking less restricted political climate created by the 1961 constitution. This paper traces how Ipekci conceptualizes ‘the public sphere’ and the role of the public by way of looking at how he approaches issues pertaining to the legal and to journalism ethics as well as how these intersect in his columns.