Before you consider slitting your wrists over the bloodbath in tech stocks, consider a mea culpa. We, in the business news media, are to blame for a lot of your misery. You might find solace in reviewing a little history of how the press, from the networks to the national business publications to Virginia Business, embraced short-lived trends, be they good or bad, and milked everything we could out of them. Fact is, the events always ran their course. Sometimes, very good things resulted from what seemed disasters. A few examples:

Let’s start in 1973. Arabs and Israelis were at war, and crude oil prices shot way up. The press was screaming about $100-a-barrel prices for crude. That touched off a mad search for alternative energy and synthetic fuels and a bout of U.S.-bashing regarding lost prestige and power. The eventual outcome? The oil companies shifted to new sources. Prices moderated. Detroit was forced to stop building gas-guzzlers, at least for a few years. Though the scene was revisited during the Iranian Revolution in 1978, America learned that it could regain control of its economy by not wasting energy so much.

By the early 1980s, the media had pounced on a new threat: The Yellow Peril. Japanese and South Korean manufacturers had become so efficient that they deluged the U.S. with cheaper and better products from steel to television sets to cars. The press had us all speaking Japanese in a few years. The real outcome? The dinosaurs of the U.S. steel industry were forced to consolidate. Detroit learned that it had to raise standards for cars (anyone remember Lee Iacocca?) By stealing Asian techniques, the U.S. became far more productive and beat the Asians at their own game. In my book, the new American efficiency was just as much responsible for the 1990s boom as the Internet, but it gets lots less attention.

By the mid-1980s, every technology writer I knew was in love with Steve Jobs and Apple Computer. This maverick had whupped giants such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Everyone was starry-eyed with the personal computer. The real outcome? IBM got wise and smashed Apple. Today, PCs are so ubiquitous that it’s hard to make money in them.

Now, we face the first comeuppance of the Internet. Frankly, I applaud it. Once again, the press led the cheers. My previous employer, BusinessWeek, was so entirely enamored with the Net that by the late 1990s it published stories on little else. Then, last year, BW published a cover story saying, essentially, that all of its boosterism over the previous five years had been wrong.

I’m not sure what the outcome of the tech downturn will be. But if history is a teacher, the results will be positive. The Net will become ever more essential. But we won’t have to worship it as the media has instructed us to. After all, we no longer worship oil, Japanese cars or personal computers. And we’re still breathing.