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The BBC business editor, Robert Peston, has admitted at an industry conference today that the media were to some extent "complicit in this canard" that house prices would continue to rise.
Peston also said that the media helped to create "a myth that somehow houses were a one-way bet and that debt never had to be repaid".
However, he dismissed suggestions that the media were responsible for the recent banking crisis that forced governments and central banks to pump trillions of pounds of public money into the ailing financial system.
Peston also denied that the media, and he in particular, should be held responsible for triggering the run on Northern Rock during early stages of the credit crunch last year.
He acknowledged that the media did play a general role in building up unrealistic expectations around property prices and failing to alert people to the dangers of taking on too much debt.
"[The] BBC, newspapers and other broadcasters, in news and also in features, were in a sense complicit in this canard that somehow house prices could only ever rise and that what you have to look at is the interest payments on your debt rather than the principle," Peston said, speaking today at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol.
"For years and years, endless property programmes and supplements created a myth that somehow houses were a one-way bet and that debt never had to be repaid and I think we do have to think a little bit about all of that," he added.
"There was a knowledge gap. Some journalists were ill-equipped to assess some of the information. It is very hard for journalists to say the consensus is wrong."
Peston played down the influence of the media in stoking the credit crunch and ensuing financial crisis that last month led to governments in the UK and elsewhere introducing unprecedented measures to prop up global money markets.
"I'm not remotely trying to argue that the media have no influence ... [of] course the media have influence but the notion that in some shape or form it was a scare brought about by either the BBC or newspaper coverage is simply wrong in my view," he said.
"It's laughable to suggest that has been responsible for £5tn of tax-payers money being put into the banking system worldwide, I'd like to think I had that kind of power but believe me, I don't," Peston added.
He also said it was "total baloney" to blame him, or the media generally, for the panic among Northern Rock customers in September last year that led to a run on its funds and eventually to the bank being nationalised.
"Plainly, my own view is that the people who were responsible for the destruction for Northern Rock were the management who made it so dependent on a particular form of financing that turned out that to be wholly unsustainable," Peston added.
"It had been 100 and something years since this kind of flight of capital from a bank had happened, people were not used to banks going to the Bank of England for emergency funding, they didn't know what it meant," he said.
He added that during the crisis Northern Rock exacerbated events by providing its customers with no tangible information on its website about what was happening and only publishing financial statements to the City.
"It turns out that most people went down to their local branch to find out what was going on, there was no clear information on the website and they just wanted to know. But when 23,000 people descend on a branch you automatically get queues, and it was the queues that cause the worry," Peston said.
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