News organizations are so busy giving their own take on the presidential nominating contests they apparently can’t be bothered to let readers in on the facts they need to draw their own conclusions. Take the recent voting in Louisiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Washington state.

Reading the accounts online in the Washington Post and both online in the New York Times and in print from the Times news service it was sometimes difficult to tell which states conducted primaries and which held caucuses. It matters a great deal whether voting is in a caucus or a primary; caucuses typically attract relatively sparse numbers. So were the showings by Obama, Huckabee and the others the product of small numbers of highly- motivated followers or of widespread support? Neither the Times nor the Post in the accounts I saw reported the number of registered Republicans and Democrats in each of the states, the percentage of eligible voters who participated and the percentage of eligible voters each candidate attracted. The depth of support, therefore, was impossible to gauge.

Both news organizations did report on the percentage of the vote the candidates garnered – in the Post, “Obama won more than two-thirds of the vote in both Nebraska and Washington,” but two-thirds of what? Were the votes actual head counts of caucus attendees or were they “delegate equivalents,” the mathematical mumbo-jumbo that may be less than reliable? This reader was left to wonder.

Readers deserve better. They deserve, among other things, to be warned about the significant differences between caucuses and primaries, they deserve less conjecture about what the results signify for the future, and more in-depth reporting about what actually happened.