It’s been a wild summer on Wall Street. And while it might seem at first blush that media stocks would be fairly immune to the credit concerns that are roiling the broader markets, many media conglomerates have in fact been punished severely.

Since the Dow hit an all-time closing high on July 19, briefly surpassing the 14,000 barrier, most media stocks have lagged the broader market during this cruel summer. (Where have you gone, Bananarama?)

While the Dow has fallen 4 percent since mid-July, shares of my parent company Time Warner (TWX) are down 8 percent. And shares of CBS (CBS), Viacom (VIAB) and News Corp. (NWS) are off 9 percent. Disney (DIS) has been the best media stock performer, falling only 2 percent.

When you think about it more, the underperformance of media stocks makes sense. Many media companies have a high degree of debt on their balance sheet and as credit standards tighten, it could become tougher for companies to borrow more money and more expensive to pay interest on existing debt.

In fact, one media analyst thinks that if the credit cycle worsens, this could be just the beginning of a prolonged slump for media stocks. In a report from late Friday, Soleil — Media Metrics analyst Laura Martin pointed out that during the last major credit crunch, the savings and loan induced crisis of the late 80s and early 90s, several media stocks endured very difficult times.

Martin wrote that Disney, like it is doing so far, held up the best thanks to a relatively low debt level and strong free cash flow. Still, shares of the House of Mouse plunged 23 percent between August 1989 and October 1990. News Corp., which had so much debt at the time that some thought it might go bankrupt, plunged 72 percent during the same time frame. Martin concedes that News Corp.’s balance sheet is in much better shape now though.

Yet, if the credit crunch becomes a full-blown crisis, it won’t be a huge surprise to see all the big media stocks suffer even more. Disney, after all, does have about $13.7 billion in debt on its balance sheet while News Corp. has about $12.5 billion. And Time Warner has nearly $36 billion in debt on its balance sheet.

In addition, Martin suggests that big cable companies, which also tend to have a lot of debt, could also be in for a deep downturn. She reminds investors that shares of Comcast (CMCSA) fell 47 percent between August 1989 and October 1990 and that shares of TCI, which was at the time the largest cable company, fell 34 percent. TCI was sold to AT&T (T) in 1999. Ma Bell subsequently sold its cable business to Comcast in 2002.

Of course, Comcast was a much smaller company in 1989 but further turmoil in the debt markets may not bode well for the higly leveraged Comcast and Time Warner, which owns the second largest cable operator, the separately traded Time Warner Cable.

For what it’s worth, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have lagged the broader market since mid-July as well. Comcast is down 12 percent and Time Warner Cable has fallen 15 percent.

Still, there is a silver lining here. Martin wrote that once the markets bottomed, media stocks roared back with a vengeance. Disney and TCI more than doubled between November 1990 and January 1994. Comcast’s stock surged 234 percent. And News Corp. soared more than 700 percent.

To be sure, trying to time the bottom of this market is a difficult thing to do. But media investors can take solace in the fact that if history is any guide, the stocks should bounce back once this current round of volatility ends.