I think a lot of errors in spelling and grammar these days (especially in print media) stem from the simple fact that people don't read anymore. Most people do not read books, and while some do read magazines, they don't read very much, and certainly not regularly. The more you read, the larger of a vocabularly you tend to have, the better you tend to spell, and the smarter you become when dealing with and manipulating language.
I used to read a lot more than I do currently, and a good portion of the fall-off can be attributed to WoW and SWG. I suppose college also shares some of the blame, as there was just less overall time to read, and I fell out of habit with it.
Of course, this is just a general hypothesis on my part, and certainly I know a lot of smart folks who don't have spelling or grammar issues and who rarely read much of anything, aside from what they find on the web. But I do think it is a trend that has a correlation with the observations here.
I can't think of the last time I looked at a news article or something in a magazine or paper that didn't have some glaring punctuation, grammatical, or spelling errors. I tend to have a few crop up in my posts here and on other sites, but I never edit my own work. I never even read back over it, and I never use spell checks on anything, unless it is a formal proposal for management at work. I generally find that spell and grammar checks have me clicking on "ignore" 96% of the time, and take up more time than me just reading over it to begin with. So I take the lazy way out, and never worry about it. Most of the time, I'm pretty darn close.
There are people on the other side of things too, who just seem to be poor spellers. Cyrus can't spell to save his life, and relies on heavy proof-reading and spell checks. He's one incredibly smart guy, and quite well read, I believe. Its just one of those things.
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