I know this is what is referred to in Midnight in Paris as "Golden Age Thinking," but I can't fight the feeling when I see television programs and interviews in the 50s and 60s that the level of "popular" discourse was much higher then than it is now. That is, interviewees of all ages are much more well spoken, articulate, and informed. I can't imagine the panel of American Idol judges (much less the audience) being able to drill down so quickly to a historical event like that, or even care to take a serious crack at it. Am I off?
Did you notice the last word spoken by the host Garry Moore was "withal", meaning "nevertheless". Can you imagine a game show host using the word today?
Yes. Or rather, the temporally-updated equivalent. Withal sounds erudite because now it's dead, and a sign of sophistication to know the word at all. Much less so then, albeit perhaps not zero.
The problem with some modern game shows isn't vocabulary. It isn't even necessarily spectacle qua spectacle, because if they could have done it and afforded it in the 50s their shows would have been bigger, too. Humans haven't changed in the past 60 years. The problem with modern game shows is something more like they have more resources than they know what to do with, competing against ten other shows with the same "problem". I'm not convinced there's a good argument for modern people being more relatively degenerate than people of old... the set of which, I would remind you, really does include actual, factual people who considered combat to the death fit entertainment.
Ex, a 60s era CBS documentary on rock--fair from and to both sides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSq1ca__cRA