February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — The new TV3 channel hopes its broadcasting of the full Clinton grand jury deposition on Monday will give a boost to its audience figures. Its rivals on RTE provided only two hours and Sky News muted some of the more salacious testimony.
The main media reaction was that it was more of a persecution than a prosecution of President Clinton, who was grilled on details of his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
The Irish Times hoped that Congress would now put the issue of impeachment aside after the "sexual witch-hunting" and allow the president to get on with his job.
The Independent said that even if Clinton had announced during his simultaneous address to the UN that there had been a Martian invasion it would still have been overshadowed by the tapes. "Whatever Mr. Clinton’s ultimate fate, the paralysis has to end," it said. "The American people will not stomach much more."
The Examiner described it as a "sordid humiliation" that might increase sympathy for Clinton. "People have had enough of this unsavory business," the paper said.
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All three newspapers carried pages of the video testimony and details that emerged in the documentation that was released.
Leading barrister Adrian Hardiman, whose forensic cross-examinations have enlivened many court cases, took a poor view of Clinton’s grillers.
"Against all the maxims of cross-examination, they asked a long series of open-ended general and repetitious questions" he said of the five attorneys questioning him. "The tactic of having five cross-examiners was a poor one. It made Clinton appear the under-dog: one against five. The cross-examination totally lacked the pace and mastery of fact that, in skillful hands, can force confessions from witnesses."
Former political advisers Tom Savage (Albert Reynolds) and Fergus Finlay (Dick Spring) both said they felt there was nothing new in the tapes that could further damage Clinton.
The tedious and repetitious questioning led RTE radio to promise to pay boredom money to a "jury" they asked to view the tapes. They broke evenly into pro- and anti-Clinton afterward.