By Don Klein

William Donald Schaefer, the perennial office-holder in Maryland politics, reached the inevitable on primary day this year. He lost his bid to be reelected comptroller of Maryland, an office he had held for almost eight years.

For more than half a century Schaefer had been a recurring name in Maryland politics. He was a Baltimore city councilman, then president of the city council, then a four term mayor and two term governor and finally a two term comptroller. He never lost an election in 51 years, until now.

Yet what did he have to say when his age (84) and childish behavior (flirting openly with an office worker young enough to be his granddaughter) and making silly demeaning campaign remarks (criticizing the dress of his opponent Janet Owens) did him in and sent him into unexpected retirement?

"You can't win when a biased newspaper is against you," he claimed, adding, that the newspaper "always was beating up" on him. He then gratuitously added at the post primary news conference that whenever he saw a certain reporter, "I wanted to puke."

These are the things you hear all the time from politicians and celebrities whenever their bad behavior finds its way into the headlines. Remember Richard M. Nixon's cry when he lost the 1962 California election for governor. He told the assembled reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

And what did President George W. Bush say recently after he received harsh rebukes from all over the country when he compared those people against the Iraq war with those who favored appeasing Hitler. "I was misrepresented in the media," he claimed despite the fact that his remarks were made live in front of millions of TV viewers.

The press is hardly the most perfect of instrumentalities in modern life, but as the messenger of happenings, good and bad, it is often blamed for the mess that people get themselves into.

Often the press is wrong because it has been misled purposely, occasionally it is misled accidentally, and less often the press draws erroneous, and unverified, conclusions. That is what happened at the January 2, 2006, Sago, WV mine tragedy when reporters took the word of family members who were incorrectly informed that all the trapped miners were saved, when in actuality only one of 13 men survived.

On occasions, members of the press themselves have done terrible damage to the reputation of fine news organs. Three victims in particular come to mind; The New York Times, The Washington Post and "CBS News." All were done in by individual staff members who either were more interested in advancing their careers or were guilty of sloppy reporting rather than being credible journalists.

Jayson Blair, an erstwhile rising star at The Times, couldn't handle the work. ''I lied and I lied, and then I lied some more,'' he wrote in his book chronicling his newspaper days. ''I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story.''

Two decades before the Blair case there was even a worse incident of fraudulent press coverage. In a 1980 Washington Post article entitled "Jimmy's World," reporter Janet Cooke wrote a gripping profile of the life of a supposed 8-year-old heroin addict.

The story engendered much sympathy among readers and an all-out search for the boy proved unsuccessful and led to claims that the story was fraudulent. Nevertheless, Cooke was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won. In the end it turned out that the story was made up by Cooke, to the embarrassment of The Post, and the Pulitzer award was returned. Cooke was unceremoniously fired.

Then of course there was the Dan Rather fiasco at CBS when documents critical of George W. Bush's National Guard service was presented as authentic in a "60 Minutes" segment. The authenticity of the documents was challenged within hours. At first Rather and CBS defended the report.

In the end, the story could not be verified and CBS and Rather apologized, several staff members involved in the story were fired and eventually Rather was demoted from the powerful job as evening news anchor and left the network.

These are rare cases. What is not rare is, "I was misquoted," the most used line of defense for badly behaving notables who say stupid things or are caught doing something they should not have. There is no press conspiracy against them as they would like you to believe.

And you can quote me on that.