Of course, virtually every media outlet in the country could make the same claim.

Four CBS News employees, including three executives, lost their jobs because the network didn’t check its facts well enough in a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush’s National Guard service.

Apparently hoaxed by some forged documents relating to Bush in the National Guard, CBS — the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — has quite-rightly been pilloried for its sloppy reporting and has apologized.

"We deeply regret the disservice this flawed "60 Minutes Wednesday" report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy," said CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves.

CBS richly deserves all the criticism it’s getting, but the real shame of the incident is that it gave Bush a "get out of jail free" card when it came to his highly questionable National Guard history.

I think even most Bush supporters suspect that something isn’t kosher about Bush’s service record. But after CBS’ screw-up, Bush’s mysterious absences from duty rosters, etc., ceased to be a major campaign issue.

The Bush campaign claimed a left-wing media bias was behind revelations that he received preferential treatment and despite receiving an honorable discharge did not discharge his duties honorably.

CBS anchor Dan Rather, a damn good newsman, made the mistake of sticking to his guns in support of the flawed story for days after it became apparent to just about everyone else that documents used in the report were forged.

Rather, a worthy successor to Murrow and Cronkite, deserves a kinder historical legacy than he will receive when he leaves the anchor chair in March. We really don’t know what the president deserves for his Vietnam era conduct because the facts were drowned out by CBS’ blunder.

So, how did the newspaper you’re reading now do when it came to errors in 2004?

Well, in addition to having a better year than CBS, we also had a better year in the accuracy department than Bush, who when pressed during the debates and TV interviews, would not admit even a single error.

We had no such qualms.

The Daily Star printed 164 corrections in 2004, up from 150 in 2003.

Were we slightly less careful in ’04 than in the previous 12 months? I don’t think so. Maybe we were more aggressive in seeking out our mistakes and owning up to them. Actually, I don’t think that was the case, either. We sought out our errors just as much in 2003.

I am happy, though, that none of our boo-boos rivaled what happened in 2003 when a then-27-year-old Hartwick College student went to elaborate extremes to make us believe he had spent his spring break training military policemen at Fort Drum for duty in Iraq.

That incident necessitated a lengthy front-page correction. Fortunately, we didn’t do anything in 2004 that warranted that kind of falling on our sword.

Putting those 164 corrections into some sort of context, the Boston Globe ran 1,031. Of course, the Globe is a not only a fine paper but runs far more stories than we do, thus presenting more opportunity for errors.

The Daily Star certainly made more errors than we reported, but I’m proud to say that we owned up to every correction-worthy error we knew about.

Some mistakes are more spectacular than others. The New York Post, for instance, trumpeted John Kerry’s choice for his vice presidential running mate on its front page.

Even the tabloid Post must have been embarrassed to have the "scoop" that Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt when the pick was actually John Edwards.

The Chicago Sun-Times managed to cram its biggest goof of 2004 into its end-of-year stock listings. Instead of printing 2004’s figures, it printed 2003’s.

But my favorite correction of 2004 was a thing of nobility and simple eloquence from Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, which — like most newspapers in the South — had pretty-much ignored the civil rights upheaval in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

On the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to its great credit, the Herald-Leader wrote: "It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission."

Wow!

Accompanying the front-page admission was a series of stories titled "Front-page news, back-page coverage," detailing the lack of civil rights reporting in The Herald and The Leader. The two papers merged in 1983.

Of course, the apology and stories couldn’t make up for the mistakes of the past. For that matter, neither do the corrections we run in The Daily Star.

But the Herald-Leader was doing its best to do the right thing. So are we. As I wrote last January in this space, we’ll try to do better this year.

Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.