SHOULDN'T NEW YORK TIMES REPORTERS KNOW THE BASIC FACTS ABOUT THE STORIES THEY COVER?

In The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg has published a story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s trollish plan to run for president as a Democrat. For the most part, her reporting isn't bad: We see Kennedy grotesquely comparing vaccine mandates to Nazism and (in Stolberg's words) "spreading misinformation by twisting facts out of context."

But then there's this:

On Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy, plans to formally announce that he is challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination for president. His vaccine skepticism gives him something in common with another candidate: former President Donald J. Trump, who like Mr. Kennedy has blamed childhood vaccines for autism — a discredited theory that has been repudiated by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies in multiple countries.

Yes, Trump has expressed vaccine skepticism in the past. But do any other presidential aspirants cross Stolberg's mind? Does she need a hint? Not too tall, humorless, sometimes wears white boots ...

Y'know, this guy?

... DeSantis has instead repeatedly taken steps to cast doubt on the efficacy of the COVID vaccine itself. He refused to say if he was getting a booster and stood next to vaccine skeptics who denounced the jab at a press conference. DeSantis recruited [state surgeon general] Joseph Ladapo, an idiosyncratic vaccine skeptic, and made Florida the only state not to recommend the COVID vaccine for children. That is not an expression of opposition to mandates. It is an expression of opposition to the vaccine. He officially declared that the state “recommends against males aged 18 to 39 receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” on the grounds that it is allegedly unsafe. That is an anti-vaccine stance, not an anti-mandate stance....

More recently, Ladapo appeared on the QAnon-supporting program X22 Report, where he called the mRNA vaccines unsafe. “Basic questions about safety have either been spun, ignored, or suppressed,” he charged.

It is worth noting that DeSantis didn’t have a surgeon general on hand who happened to turn crazy on vaccines. He recruited him from out of state specifically because of his crank anti-vaccine beliefs.

That's reporting from Jonathan Chait. Why didn't Stolberg mention him? How can you be a political reporter for the most important newspaper in America and, when the time comes to compare an anti-vaccine crackpot who's running for president with other presidential aspirants, not acknowledge the guy who's made opposition to vaccines a centerpiece of his campaign?

It's not as if Stolberg is constrained from mentioning DeSantis because he's not yet officially a candidate. In the very next paragraph, she quotes Steve Bannon:

“Robert F. Kennedy could jump into the Republican primary for president and only DeSantis and Trump, I think, would do better,” Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said recently on his podcast, referring to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

We all know DeSantis plans to run. Why not cite him as a fellow vaccine denialist, or at least someone who's gone all in on denialism in order to win Republican primaries?

I assume it's the usual mainstream-media tunnel vision, which causes journalists to see Trump as the only problematic figure in the Republican Party. But on this subject -- and many others -- DeSantis is far worse.