Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis speaks to supporters as his wife Casey DeSantis, back right, listens during at a rally Monday, Nov. 5, 2018, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

As I noted Saturday, the mainstream media has been banging the “Republican governors have been slow to respond to the coronavirus outbreak” drum for days now.

For example, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) rejected attempts by MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle Friday to get him to criticize Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who she insinuated was slow to respond to the pandemic because he didn’t implement shelter in place orders for his state as quickly as many other governors did:

“Can we talk about your state of Florida? One of the last states — not all the states have participated, one of the most recent to issue this stay-at-home order,” Ruhle said. “What in the world is going on down there? You have a whole lot of senior citizens and last I checked, they’re pretty high risk.”

“Yeah, so let me say one thing. I think for all practical purposes, we were in a stay-at-home order. Virtually every county in the state, if not every, had restrictions in place. Perhaps with the exception of,” Rubio replied, before Ruhle cut him off.

Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei was on the same wavelength in an interview he did last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, which my RedState colleague Bonchie reported. On the red state governors who haven’t officially declared their states “shelter in place”, here’s what VandeHei said:

“What you’re seeing here, and this is a bigger problem for society, is information inequality,’ VandeHei said. ‘Like, why (did) Desantis do what he did? Why did Georgia wait so long? They were listening to President Trump. They were watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh. The information was there. In the information bubble, they were basically getting a lot of sort of noise and news pollution.”

To be blunt, the problem with these hot takes from the likes of Ruhle, VandeHei and others in the mainstream media is that they’re horse poop, as Gabriel Malor explains:

I see journalists going a bit bonkers about pestering governors that don't have state-wide stay-at-home orders.

They should note, however, that even in those states, all schools are closed, all nonessential business are closed, and gatherings of more than ten people are banned.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) April 4, 2020

Like, sure, get all huffy about no stay-at-home. But let's not make the opposite error of portraying these places as simply ignoring the outbreak.

I'm talking mostly about political journalists, who are being pretty sloppy about this.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) April 4, 2020

Just because there isn't a stay-at-home order doesn't mean it's business as usual. Your readers deserve better than this, journos.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) April 4, 2020

Like this guy. Look at all those (R)s, notes the political journo.

Fine print: all schools in these states are closed, all nonessential business are closed, and gatherings of more than ten people are banned.

And even in states with stay-at-home orders, people can still go out. https://t.co/IWjvVHy6ze

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) April 4, 2020

Case in point, in my neighboring state of South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster (R) has effectively done the “stay at home” thing even though he hasn’t made the actual “shelter at home” declaration. He’s pretty much shut down all “non-essential” services. And like Rubio said about DeSantis, many school districts and cities/counties in Florida acted to put restrictions in place well before DeSantis decided to go the “shelter in place” route.

Also, not every state’s situation is the same, so we shouldn’t expect a midwestern state with a vastly lower amount of cases to take the same approaches as the harder hit states like California and New York because, as my RedState colleague Nick Arama pointed out yesterday, the “national pandemic” is varying a lot right now, depending on region.

The MSM can dunk on these Republican governors all they want, but if they actually did their homework instead of operating from the Orange Man Bad premise, they’d understand that the data does not support their arguments.

(Hat tip: Twitchy)