Even sports junkies have it in for the NY Times

The NY Times really isn't a leading sports rag, any way you slice it. But it comes under FanHouse scrutiny anyways:

As far as our coverage of the case itself, if the essence of your question is whether I feel good about it, the answer is that I very much regret my failure to recognize that we were dealing with a rogue prosecutor and that the university had compounded his bravado by overreacting to the initial reports about the case. I don't recall another instance of a university canceling the season of a team that was a contender for a national championship. Nor do I recall a similar example of a prosecutor launching such an aggressively wrongheaded investigation.

But the bottom line is that I'd do some things differently, and that knowledge gained by hindsight has informed our approach to other stories since then.

There's nothing the Times will ever be able to do to make up for the way it covered the Duke lacrosse story, but acknowledging their mistakes and vowing to change the paper's approach going forward is better than nothing.

It might be better to read another paper.

UPDATE: Maybe the Times is turning the corner? (via Glenn Reynolds)