I agree with you. Television has certainly lost influence, particularly with young people. I think that likely why you see the vast majority of television programming is aimed at people in their late 20's-early 30's now days, the people who grew up during the same peak period for television influence that you talked about in this post. Even most cartoons nowdays seem equally aimed at people in their 20's as they are at children. Interestingly it also seems to be that age group that constantly defends and re-elects the political establishment, with some help from the baby boomers of course.