It's not that people don't care it's that there's a deliberate, active move away from valorising certain ways of speech as 'proper' and 'correct'.
You talk about proper enunciation, but enunciate properly in which accent? Which dialect? Who decides which is the 'correct way of speaking', and why should they be able to valorise one way over another? And glottal stops are a perfectly legitimate component of speech. Some accents use them, some don't. And that has also changed over time. What was once classed as 'correct' and 'elite' would now sound broad and common.
The whole notion of 'speaking properly' is a minefiled laced with elitism and class division and geographical hierarchialism. Until recently it was normal to valorise RP and 'proper speaking' and most of us have been brought up thinking there's a correct way of speaking and everything else is a corruption of that. And we all have accents we can't bear the sound of, as well as those which we think sound 'uneducated' or 'thick'. But how much difference is there between that and, say, people thinking the Scouse accent sounds leery or criminal or whiny or all those other adjectives that have been employed to do it down?
The current vogue in broadcasting is to feature a multiplicity of accents and speechforms. It can be painful but there's merit in that, if for no other reson than to give the lie to the purported link between accent and intelligence.
The old saying is that a language is just a dialect with an army; the same, or something similar, can be said about 'correct speaking'.
I think this makes some very good points regarding accent and intelligence. However, when people are being paid to speak, it really shouldn't be too much to expect that they:
1. pronounce words correctly (and by that I mean being able to pronounce the necessary sounds in the correct order! I think that can be generally established outside of accent based differences, most of the time.) When it comes to pronouncing player and team names properly, that is part of the bloody job. Practice!
2. understand the meaning of the words they use (using "intelligent"-sounding words incorrectly really does make you sound like a dick).
3. not be lazy with language. Half the modern pundits sound like they are down the pub with some mates, with all the casual slang and memey "bants" that that seems to entail. It's fucking awful punditry, and if I want to listen to that level of inanity, I can go to an actual pub. Although the "banter" in my local is certainly wittier.
So while it's certainly true that some people still have pretty fixed notions about RP and what constitutes an intelligent or acceptable accent, I think the problem with the current bunch is that they are, for the most part, just not very good at words. Which is the job. Mind you, I think Micah Richards might have broken me because I'm beginning to find his all-out laugher approach to punditry quite funny. Ultimately, I'd like him to contribute nothing other than continuous laughter throughout the entire tournament, hopefully making Roy Keane explode in the process.
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