It's not minor, the implications of such mistakes are enormous (especially in the days of easy copy-pasting, semi-universal support for utf8 on the web, and plenty of ways to do research) on a cultural level.
Poor journalism and disdain for what's foreign, the ASCII way. Vae victis.
It's often the same with German names/words. Ü/U, etc are absolutely not the same and not equivalent. Leaving out the two dots on top of the U changes the whole word/meaning. Ü would be equivalently written as ue.
"Enormous"? No, not really, it's more of a nice to have. As a native speaker of an umlauty Nordic language, if you drop the umlauts, it's virtually always quite easy and in fact almost effortless to work out which words is being referred to from context.
