Edited edit: Ah-hah! The book had its name changed, it is now called Groove Tube, and I've found a copy online.

Edit: After hunting around all day through unpublished MA theses and books by journalists, I found a book called 'Plastic Hippies: The Counterculture on TV.' It answers this question in great depth, but I couldn't find a copy anywhere online. So I've emailed the author and asked if she'd reply here. We'll see what happens.

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This is a complicated question, in part because it deals with such recent history, and there is a current incarnation of 'hippy' that tints how we read the idea of hippies back onto the 60s. Or, in plain English, what we think of as hippies today is not the same as what hippies were in the 60s, and this relates intimately to the question you're asking.

The term seems to stem from 'hipster', an earlier term, and I'm having a hard time nailing down a reliable source for a chronology. But it attached itself to a subculture in Haight-Ashbury (a district off Golden Gate Park in SF). Mainstream media outlets "discovered" the hippies in the Haight, and began writing trend pieces about them, which kicked off a wave of disaffected (mostly young) Americans moving to San Francisco. Examples of such pieces here and here.

I don't want to get too much into the weeds of the exact chronology here. The thing that's germane to your question is this: there was a Beat influenced subculture in California that began to be identified as hippies which gave rise to a wave of media coverage about hippies. This meant that people would hear about "hippy" subculture from TV, magazines and popular music (most famously If You're Going To San Francisco). And many people, by all accounts, did go to San Francisco because of this.

In 1967, a radical group called The Diggers held a funeral for Hippy in Haight Ashbury, enjoining people to 'make the revolution where you live' instead of coming to San Francisco. This is a very striking example of the relevant dynamic moving forward. Hippy began as a kind of local subculture, but media coverage (including TV) turned it into something of a fad. Initially it was (like the Beats) a milieu that mixed art, politics and drug use. It was never totally a political project. But the funeral was, in part, a protest that it was losing its radicalism and becoming a kind of hedonistic fad.

Edit: I have had Reddit eat two versions of this updated paragraph and I'm out of patience but tl;dr, I left an important event out of my original timeline. A Human Be-In was staged in January 1967, as a protest against a recent ban on LSD in California, at which Timothy Leary appeared. He made his famous Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out speech. There were musical performances by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson airplane. Later this year, "If You're Going to San Francisco" debuted on the radio. Media coverage of hippies in the Haight reached a fever pitch, and a coalition of local groups including the Diggers organized the 'Summer of Love' to meet the anticipated wave of people.

There is a great quote from one of the organizers of the Summer of Love from the SF Chronicle, but every time I try to paste it into this comment it wipes out all my edits. But basically it says that they resented the media attention and no longer consider themselves hippies.

Obviously "hippy" did not die in 1967, some of its most enduring images come from the last two years of the 60s. The word floated around and attached itself to all kinds of expressions of youth culture - rock and roll, the anti-war movement, even feminism. It also began to pick up a pejorative context, a way for people who didn't like the new counter-culture to express their disdain for it. In this way, it could mean something not dissimilar from "woke" today.

So as time wore on, "hippy" became a label people affixed to themselves and to their opponents. The most relevant example if we're talking about TV is unquestionably the Yippies. Nominally it stood for 'Youth International Party' but calling it a party was a real stretch. The Yippies, particularly Abbie Hoffman, were incredibly media savvy. They bought a pig and ran it for president. They turned their trials after the Chicago DNC into a media circus. Abbie Hoffman once went into the NYSE and started throwing hundreds of dollar bills onto the trading floor, which created a scrum as traders scrambled to get the money. Which created, of course, an incredible photo op.

At one point they organized an event where they promised to levitate the Pentagon and turn it orange. Another time, they held a press conference where they claimed to have a new drug that would make people have sex in public. The press expressed skepticism and the Yippies offered to dose them with it.

There was an element of fun in this but it was also a deliberate communications strategy on the part of the Yippies, who were able to get a ton of free publicity for their radical anti-capitalist politics out of this. Hoffman is probably most famous for writing a book called "Steal This Book" which stores didn't want to stock.

So basically hippy became at once a marketable strategy to appeal to young people (see its aesthetics in this famous Coke ad) while remaining a counter-cultural milieu that contained political currents. Some people were anti-capitalist and anti-hippy (especially Marxists who perceived it to be unserious and bourgeois). Others, like the anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin, embraced it.

In a way, hippy simply became a synonym for the whole zeitgeist of youth culture in the late 60s and early 70s. Considering hippy began as an urban arts and culture thing in SF, it's interesting that it's closely associated with the back to the land movement a few years later. But the material point here is just that the media became interested in hippies and that interest was sustained. So it often framed new social trends as a thing "hippies" were doing. Sometimes hippies exploited that, as in the case of the Yippies, and sometimes they tried to repel it, as in the case of the Digger funeral for hippy. Note that the Diggers were one of a number of groups in SF, and that they didn't speak for all "hippies" when they held the mock funeral.

Long story short, the media invented the thing we think of as "hippies" today. It then began commodifying and selling that thing, first as rebellion and then as nostalgia. By the 90s (when there was a revival of interest in the 60s) "hippy" had become a key frame for remembering (and forgetting) the social upheaval of the 60s.

Art and media historian here! Television was very important to some hippies. The first is with the back-to-the-land or rural communalists of the late 1960s and early 1970s (think the Whole Earth Catalog) and the second, related group would be members of the counterculture who were engaged in television-based activism, sometimes referred to as "guerrilla television."

I can speak to the second aspect of the "counterculture," as it's one of my areas of specialization.

Television was important to hippies because it was a system that they could potentially change. In the mid-1960s, there were technologies for media broadcast, specifically the Sony Portapak, one of the first commercially available videocameras, that gave rise to the ability for consumers to produce and air their own television programs. Rather than having just three major networks, e.g., ABC, NBC, and CBS, with only a handful of programs, the idea of creating alternative television, such as public access TV shows and community programming, were part of this ethos as well.

TV was not video, however. So while TV may have been reviled, video was what could make it better. It's similar to how, with smart phones in the 2000s/2010s, people started making their own videos and creating their own successful programming online. These are programs coming from the ground-up, not from the studios themselves.

Various video collectives and guerrilla activist groups that came out of this time period include TVTV, Raindance Corporation, and (sometimes) Ant Farm. The content of some of the videos by these groups may seem banal today--lots of local events were broadcast--but the idea of putting a video camera in someone's hand--children, people of all ethnicities, etc.--was a still-revolutionary idea.

By the mid-1970s, TV as the enemy of video was publicized by the video and architecture collective Ant Farm with their raucous event "Media Burn." The event included "astronauts," a JFK-lookalike, and a lot of fanfare leading to coverage of their event by local news networks. The JFK impersonator asks something like "My fellow Americans, haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?" and it ends with a wall of TVs being crashed into by a Super-Cadillac Space Car.

https://mediaburn.org/video/media-burn-by-ant-farm-2003-edit/

There's a lot of relevant stuff written by Marshall McLuhan as well. His concept of the counter-environment was that artists (and others) could create alternative uses of media that could show the inner workings of the media, breaking down some of its problems.

I would write more except that I'm turning in the final draft of my dissertation next week. Wish me luck! And sorry if there's a million typos.

Bibliography:

Joselit, David. Feedback: Television Against Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Kaizen, William. Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016.

London, Barbara. “Video: A Selected Chronology, 1963–1983.” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 249–262.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Art as Anti-Environment.” Art News Annual 31 (October 1966): 54–57.

Radical Software issues 1-6.

Scott, Felicity. Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2016.

Shamberg, Michael, and Raindance Corporation. Guerrilla Television. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

———. The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.