Gen. DePuy felt that the reporters in Vietnam who worked with the combat troops were fine:
I liked them, and I thought they were fair enough, and very brave, and as good as combat reporters have ever been. I am thinking about Arnett, Pappas and the like. I think the problem was not with the reporters so much as it was with the editors back in the United States. I have a theory which may not hold water, but it seems to me that something happened fairly early on, maybe even as early as 1962, ’63, or ’64, which resulted in the intellectual elements of our society — and this included a lot of the editors, television correspondents, and even some of the reporters — somehow getting the impression that social justice was on the side of the enemy. This happened early on and then was repeated again later, with the American public. In other words, I see it as two waves.
The first wave was amongst the reporters and the intellectuals coming to the conclusion that somehow or another we were guilty of some form of political aggression and were being heavy-handed about it. Conversely, there was a love affair with the idea of the brave freedom fighter in black pajamas making monkeys out of the establishment. Then, that whole thing was repeated when American troops went over. When the American troops first went over, the American people, the man on the street, was told that there was a communist menace, and that we were going over to cope with it. Therefore, at that time, the enemy was the problem. The enemy was evil. Then, through the bombardment of television and articles written by a lot of the intellectuals who had already been through this process earlier with the ARVN, it seems to me that the average American got to the point where he wondered on which side lay the purity of social justice. Now that we know about the aims and activities of the North Vietnamese and their direction of the effort from the very beginning, all of this was nonsense.