Abstract :
Even though, in the first couple of years of its governance, the Democrat Party (DP) of Turkey implemented free communication policies, these policies did not remain in place for long time. Throughout its entire rule, the DP attempted to form a dependent press through which public resources could be controlled and redistributed. Similarly, public radio became a propaganda vehicle for the DP government. Recent documents founded in both the Turkish state archive as well as a private archive reveal the DP’s intentions to control the Turkish public through restrictive press policies. However, DP’s restrictive press policies were not limited to control of neither the newspaper press nor the public radio. In particular, the documents reveal how members of the government infringed upon the Turkish constitution by opening and copying the letters of many important people, including journalists. In this article, I analyze the act of opening private letters as an infringement upon freedom of communication.
