I didn't look at all the pages, but Google News' 1310 errors are caused in large part by the fact that they don't even declare a doctype. The use of the
font tag (and not even quoting attribute values) is pretty embarrassing, but as previously stated, it's "good enough" for most browsers to render it properly.
There are dozens of very valid reasons for why that isn't really "good enough," but I won't get into those here. I don't think it's a question of whether or not standards are a joke, I just think there is disagreement among people as to whether or not they're worth adhering to. Having a few errors is no big deal; using deprecated HTML tags is a big deal (or at least I assume it will be at some point). I don't think the standards were created under the assumption that everyone would adhere 100% to them; that simply requires more effort than most people are willing to put forth.
This is further compounded by the fact that, yes, browsers do generally properly render even horrific markup such as that on Google News. I would argue that this is only done because it's a necessity and it shouldn't be viewed as a license to create deplorable markup, but what do I know. Until such a time that the advantages of proper standards (and extensions of them, such as microformats) become real benefits to people/businesses, many (most?) will continue to create junk markup -- because they're simply lazy, want to save a few bytes on the page load, or whatever other justifications they come up with.
That doesn't mean standards are a joke, it just means the benefits are too few, too poorly understood, or perceived as too insignificant (who cares about blind people on the internet?!?!)