On Tuesday, Keith Olbermann invited NBC News human delegate calculator Chuck Todd on to Countdown to discuss the latest tallies from the Democratic Primary. Todd said that “last week” Barack Obama magically earned four more delegates in California than previously reported. The way he phrased his statement made it sound like lollygagging election officials in the Golden State took their sweet time getting around to counting things like provisional ballots. “California,” he said, “they always have a lot of late votes to count.”

Todd’s gloss-over was exactly the kind we’ve come to depend on from our media experts. Yes, thank you, please spare us the details. Except that the details of the delegate pledging and counting are still more likely to affect the outcome of the Democratic primary contest than any of the personality stories filling the front pages.

Turns out the California Secretary of State’s office issued the revised results less than two weeks after the Super Tuesday vote on February 5. In other words, Obama picked up the extra four delegates almost a month ago. Back then, blogger David Dayen was all over it at his blog Calitics. But none of the major media gurus like Todd bothered to notice until this past Monday when the Wall Street Journal column “Numbers Guy” cited Dayen’s reporting.

After Todd’s comments on Olbermann’s show Tuesday evening, Dayen blogged an “in your face!” post aimed at MSNBC and the other major news outlets. In it, he calls Todd a liar. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. Either way, the story is about more than a blogger owning paid network wonks. It’s another example of the slapdash and slippery way the major media outlets are covering this primary. The shifting delegate tally is a complex story but it’s verifiable information— news tied to information-gathering methods that can be examined. Sinister superdelegates, possible vice presidential choices and “slice and dice” race and gender campaigning is the opposite— soft and squishy and subjective. News celebrities are good at soft and squishy, so the nitty-gritty of caucus and primary delegate pledging and counting is being left to mostly unseen and apparently not intensely factchecked “experts.”

Which of course means that those interactive, color-coded delegate tallies network commentators like to point to and poke at really are just props. Don’t believe the hype. Until the actual in-the-flesh delegates stand up in Denver and shout out about how “The great state of this and that proudly casts its vote for the honorable senator from blah blah blah” all those numbers on all those fancy flat screens are little more than educated guesses. Tallies not only change as late votes come in but also because, just like the superdelegates, the so-called pledged delegates, the actual people we’ll see on television this August in Denver, do not technically have to follow the will of the voters once they get there— a crazy but true fact that the Hillary campaign has admitted to considering in formulating its summer strategy.

Hard reporting on the delegate tallies really matters, especially reporting on the nuts and bolts of the process through which delegates are being registered with the party and calculated in the press. How better to guard against vote tallying shenanigans, which are as much a part of democracy in action as is voting? That Obama “found” four delegates in California after the primary totals were reported is at least as significant as the eight delegates Clinton may have gained in the Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island contests on March 4. The story of her mini-Super Tuesday gains was a high-def headline scream. The four late California delegates should have rated at least a story or two back in mid-February when the Secretary of State announced them.

In missing Obama’s post-Election Day pick-ups, the mainstream media, like Chuck Todd, also missed the reason why it took so long for California to adjust the totals. It wasn’t, as Todd told Olbermann, because “California… they always have a lot of late votes to count.” In fact, it was due at least in part to concerns about voter disenfranchisement, a part of the story of this race we’re bound to return to, even if long after the election has been decided.

If you haven’t heard of California’s “double bubble” debacle, you’re not alone. Not many people have heard of it, but it was a big deal on Super Tuesday. A ballot design that would have made Katharine Harris proud forced voters to fill in an extra bubble indicating the party primary in which they wanted to cast their vote. If you failed to fill in the extra bubble, your ballot got tossed. Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior scholar at the University of Southern California’s School of Public Policy, says more than 90,000 ballots are under review by L.A. acting-registrar/recorder county clerk Dean Logan because of the “double-bubble crisis.” On top of that, many young, mostly would-be Obama voters were improperly turned away because they belonged to a third party. Informed third-party voters requested provisional ballots, but many didn’t know that using a provisional ballot was an option. Fact is that if everyone who came to the polls to vote for Obama had been allowed to do so, he probably would have picked up more than four extra delegates. Again, doesn’t any of that rate a story or two? Doesn’t this intense and extraordinarily close primary demand the sort of on-the-ground, unembedded, shoe-leather reporting that would dig into stories like these?

Score another one for the blogosphere, especially Mr. Dayen. He scooped big media. But if momentum built on TV-land speculation has become the Holy Grail for candidates looking to win over undecided voters and superdelegates, how much does a scoop in a quiet corner of the web matter?

Dayen says that even in the wake of the Wall Street Journal story, many media outlets still haven’t added Obama’s extra California delegates to their tallies. As the primary season limps along into the summer, the networks are sure to fill airtime with more talk of “monster” comments and 3 a.m. phone calls. Meantime, a raft of real news will be missed, smothered or ignored.

No wonder everyone keeps talking about change.

Update: Sunday morning’s Meet The Press touched on the shifting delegate counts.

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JB Powell is a contributing writer and the author of The Republic: A Novel. Guilty collaborationist: John Tomasic, who added reporting and writing for this piece.