(Read the opening paragraph of this Washington Post story about elections in Argentina, for instance, and ask yourself if the Post would ever write about American elections that way.)

I’ve found myself thinking repeatedly about this disparity over the past couple of days, as the anti-Muslim climate in the United States has reached new heights and as Donald Trump has begun conducting what even some conservatives describe as a fascist campaign. How, I wonder, would the American media cover some other country—in South America, say, or the Middle East—where leading presidential candidates explicitly stirred up hatred against an already-demonized minority group and cheered on the beating of protesters at their events; or where armed gangs patrolled outside faith centers and leading businesses sanctioned religious discrimination?

The question answers itself, really. We’d be reading story after story about the terrifying authoritarian climate tearing through Country X—all with the implied assertion that We Don’t Do That Sort Of Thing Here, Thank God.

Well, we certainly do that sort of thing here. Far too often, though, some of our top media outlets are either soft-peddling what’s happening in the presidential campaign and in the country at large, or diving right into the cesspool along with the Trumps of the world. (More on that later.)

When Trump retweeted made-up, racist crime statistics from a neo-Nazi, some outlets initially called his actions “controversial” or “questionable,” as though there was some debate about the odiousness of what he’d done. A New York Times story described his calls to surveil and register Muslims as “emphatic, if controversial.” A Monday report on CBS dutifully showed tape of Trump and Ben Carson demanding more tracking of Muslims, then tape of President Obama and Jeb Bush objecting, then summed it all up by showing a poll that said a majority of Americans don’t think Obama has a clear plan to fight ISIS. And that was that.

Can that not be that, please? The mainstream political media has such a pathological dedication to the notion of balance and “objectivity” that it often finds itself at a complete loss when it comes to dealing with someone like Trump. But the kind of filth that he and others are putting out has long since moved past the debatable stage. There is an Islamophobic crisis building in this country. To oppose discrimination against Muslims is not to take some partisan stand. It’s to be a human being. To oppose a prominent political figure’s use of fascistic slander toward black people is not to shirk your objectivity. It’s the least the elite media should be doing.