The term hacker originally means someone who hacks at their keyboard to solve computer problem. A step above code-monkey. The people the press now refer to as hackers would have previously been known as crackers. As in password crackers for example.
I agree, but this is arguable.
There is a tale that the term 'hacker' arose from prominent U.S. university student/faculty?, circa 1970's, purposefully breaking software to explicitly demonstrate the insecurity of ever increasingly complex programs.
Hackers were showing the inexperienced, or willfully ignorant, programmers that they were not debugging and unit testing their programs properly.