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	Phil's Blogservations Monday, July 29, 2002 Posted by philgomes 7:45 PM The Hype Machine's Other Half: After rightly lambasting the Henry Blodgetts and Mary Meekers of the world, a lot of people turn to point the finger at stercoraceous, over-funded companies and their PR firms for inflating the so-called "dot-com bubble." Well and good, since they certainly played their part, and to a substantial degree. However, few consider the complicity of the media—trade, business, consumer, national, and so on—in what was to become the greatest pyramid scheme of all time. I now offer this article from someone who says he all-but-predicted the "New Economy's" collapse. This writer claims that he would've had the opportunity to publish his related thoughts in The New York Times had his editors not allegedly accused him of "misreading the landscape," spiking the story on those grounds. Something about not seeing the "triumph" of "new media" over "old media." Asked "what does it all mean?" by his editors, this writer was offered the opportunity to armchair quarterback the purchase of Time Warner by AOL. He viewed it as a situation whereby an overvalued company with few strong assets—save for its massive-but-tepidly-growing subscriber base—used its stratospherically inflated stock to purchase a company with real assets before an inevitable crash occurred. (Remember that this was around the time when people honestly thought that Yahoo! was considering the purchase of Disney.) If this is indeed true, it's a incredibly disturbing example of the mass hallucination that Americans suffered during those heady times. Of course, as SRI CEO Dr. Curt Carlson once told me, "perspective gives you a hundred extra IQ points." Still, if this was what was going on in newsrooms everywhere, it's a scary thing indeed for both media relations pros and media consumers. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.