Ok, enough ranting. It's not so. You point out one reason it's not so, legal threat. But fundamentally, it's the problem of journalism, period. Your intelligent and provocative essay, I regret to say, is built on a flawed foundation.
Language is exactly the opposite, it is highly under-rated.
It is not lies and misunderstandings that give language a bad name, it is its practitioners. If a clumsy doctor kills a patient we do not say that medicine is bad. If an innocent man is convicted because of feckless representation, we do not say that law is bad. In all things perceptions are the shadows cast upon truth. In mathematics, one theorem may be proved in a number of different ways.