Irish Daily Mail columnist Paul Drury has told the High Court neither he nor his newspaper had an agenda to write a nasty piece about businessman Denis O'Brien.
Mr Drury has begun giving evidence in defence of a defamation action by Mr O'Brien over an article he wrote in January 2010.
Mr O'Brien is claiming the article, about his appearance in RTÉ News reports on the relief effort after the earthquake in Haiti, accused him of hypocrisy motivated by self-interest.
Mr Drury said his newspaper believed in expressing trenchant views on matters of public interest, but there was no agenda and no deliberate intention to be nasty.
He said the publication of the Moriarty Report was widely expected in 2010 around the time he wrote the article.
The previous summer, Mr O'Brien had released the preliminary findings into the public domain by giving interviews to three journalists, he said.
Mr Drury said his understanding of those findings, based on what Mr O'Brien had put into the public domain, was that he would be excoriated by the tribunal report.
His understanding was the tribunal would find Mr O'Brien had been awarded the mobile phone licence as a result of a corrupt relationship with a government minister.
He said Mr O'Brien had engaged in a PR campaign mocking the tribunal, and its judge and legal team, and had run a website about it.
The impending publication of the report was the biggest story of the decade, he said, with enormous hours of radio and TV coverage and pages of newspaper coverage.
Mr Drury said soon after the earthquake in Haiti he saw the first reports from Haiti on the RTÉ's Six-One News.
He said he remembered seeing an extended interview with Mr O'Brien and found it remarkable that the focus was so much on Mr O'Brien and it was such an extended report.
Mr Drury said: "The whole focus of this report was Mr O'Brien and the interviews with him and I found that remarkable."
He said he found it intriguing the manner in which it had been put together.
There was footage of Mr O'Brien and reporter Charlie Bird in the centre of Port Au Prince and a later interview in the airport.
It struck him forcibly that a lot of time and effort had gone into putting the package together.
It was clear from the longer interview that the reporter had discussed with Mr O'Brien what he wanted to say.
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