First, I assume that when you say that your initial feeling is that you're seeing more lack of critical thinking (rather than more actually existing). This is a bit of a problem for me, because for me personally, in an academic setting I AM seeing that there actually is less critical thought. But even if it weren't based on my personal experience, the fact that you are seeing more means that more exists, or at least the same amount exists, which I still fell is stagnation if not full on decline in the ability of people to think.

Burt really, I just wanted to point out that even though you are seeing the gaps in thinking in people's output – blogs, media, opinions, agendas, time crunch – I think that it is way more important to think(critically) aboput not the source of our recognition of the lack, but of the lack itself. I mentioned experience in academia, and I am involved in higher education at the moment, but I think there is something that anyone who has been through a public education system like the one in America can see. The education in teh early years is based on memorization and not on thinking. Teachers say "this happened, these atoms wiegh this much, and teh holocaust was bad ". I have rarely , if ever, gone into a junior high classroom and found students and teachers enganged in any kind of analytic discussion about things like Jefferson's motivation for sending out Lewis and Clarke or Michael Crichton’s speech about global warming. The media may need more support based on primary references, but in the schools, when you have to prove (or cite) information, all you have to do is prove that some "expert" or Ph. D. or just anyone said the thing before you did. Basically, even when quoteing sources, relianceand emphais is on secondary sources. Not personal research and experimentation, or critical thought and analysis.

If it's missing in education there is no surprise that it's getting harder and harder to find when you look around you.