on mis-using words

Recently, I've been quite amazed at some of the bad writing that is so pervasive all around. Here, I'm not even talking about mis-managed sentences, poorly placed adverbs, dangling participles, etc. I'm concerned more about the quick-fix, poorly-thought news articles, the shock-at-all-cost fiction, the appease-instead-of-decide-on-a-moral/ethical-standard version of politics, the blatant-disregard-for-jurisdiction actions of the Supreme Court, media, President, and Jude Law.

Am I asking too much of the profusion of words around me? My students acknowledge the idea of thinking about what the ideas behind expression in writing, but when it comes to the page, they tend to just babble in Times New Roman--which seems to somehow legitimate the ideas that they stopped considering. Have we transferred the print culture = respectability equation into some vague notion of "you write words, so they must be well-thought" tautology? It just leaves me frustrated to see the mangling of thinking/reason/ethics that passes for contemporary culture.

This, of course, being what I think just before I go teach... :/