It depends on the definition of journalist. I believe that it is now considered appropriate for a journalist to do the following:
1) Assist foreign leaders in destroying America's friends.
2) Reveal the location of American troops within a war zone (and where they will be in a few hours).
3) Remain silent when observing American troops approaching an ambush (this one is a point of contention -- older journalists like Peter Jennings adhere to this, but younger, embedded journalists, tend to disregard this one).
During my recent adventure in Afghanistan, one of our teams was force-fed two embeds (a writer and a photographer) that accompanied them on a mounted patrol from Herat (IIRC) to Chagcharan, across some of the most God-forsaken terrain on Earth. No one knew what was out there and the only way to know the ground truth was to send Americans there.
The team was not thrilled to get these two guys, who came from the very liberal LA Times. Over the course of several weeks, though, damned if the mostly-Southern SF guys and the LA newsmen didn't, well, bond. The story wound up being a Page 1 story, on about December 28 or 29, and the photographs were, well, way better than the ones we shoot ourselves. The photographer burned all his digital photos on to CDs for the team, which he sure didn't have to do, and gave a copy to the unit's ops officer (I was there when he did it). The story told a lot of good stuff but the reporter was perfectly scrupulous about operational security and nothing that could have harmed the men, their families, or our ongoing operations, was printed. (For instance these reporters knew lots of personal details about the operators they were with, but printed only first names, military ranks, and very general homes: "Sergeant First Class Mike from southern Georgia...")
The newsmen brought their own stuff, and lived rough with the team, sleeping on the ground, eating MREs and local food (when offered), and attending to the call of nature by slipping behind some rocks with a shovel and a roll of TP in hand. When a HMMWV rolled over, imjuring one of the guys, they helped out. They never complained.
We had dreaded having the reporter with our guys, but after this some of our teams actually asked for them (with Iraq heating up, there weren't many interested in going with our teams into harm's way). Unfortunately the experiment won't be repeated because General McNeill has ordered that in the future anyone talking to reporters must provide full name, age, hometown, etc. and special ops people have lost their expectation of anonymity. Since we already had wives getting crank calls from antiwar zealots, a situation about which McNeill cared not a jot, we clammed up completely with the press after that.
It's a pity because our guys over there are doing great work, and the public deserves to know about it, and the one time we put a couple of left-liberal reporters with a gang of very conservative soldiers, they came away with considerable mutual respect.
Ah well, I think half our guys kept diaries... the books are just a matter of time.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F