To get a sense of just how desperately liberals in the media are trying to lend cover to Joe Biden and his 49-year-old son Hunter Biden, you need only have watched 90 seconds of MSNBC’s Chuck Todd on Friday.

That’s how long it took Todd to declare that the curious and weirdly lucrative financial deals Hunter landed while his dad was vice president are off-limits because, as Todd put it, Hunter is “not a public figure.”

This is how you know you can’t trust so much of what the national media say. If Hunter Biden isn’t a public figure, deserving of fair comment and criticism, then no one is, not even the sitting president.

Three months ago, Hunter literally flexed for a photographic spread in the New Yorker. He gave the magazine an extensive interview for a very lengthy profile that asked in the headline, “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?”

And that was voluntary.

Here are two headlines from national newspapers:

“The Hunter Biden story is a troubling tale of privilege,” Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2019.

“Tiptoeing Around Hunter Biden,” New York Times, Oct. 10, 2019.

On Saturday, one day after Todd’s ignorant commentary on journalistic ethics, Hunter appeared for an on-camera interview with ABC News.

Never in history has there been a more public non-public figure than Hunter Biden, except maybe every single journalist who begins a news package with, “I never sought to be part of the story…”

What Todd meant was: I don’t like that President Trump has had an effective political attack on Joe Biden, which happens to implicate his own profiteering, drug-addled son.

Yes, there’s a there there. Nobody can honestly say that Joe Biden, while he was vice president, wasn’t aware of or passively participating in Hunter's self-enrichment. Hunter's sweet business interests conveniently coincided with his father’s political engagement with Ukraine and China.

Trump was brilliant in his remarks about it last week during a campaign rally in Minneapolis, and it got people really upset. “Joe’s son Hunter got thrown out of the Navy and then he became a genius on Wall Street in about two days,” Trump said. “By the way, whatever happened to Hunter? Where the hell is he?”

Well, there he is! He’s having a sit-down on network television, just like so many non-public figures do!

“Where is Hunter?” Trump continued. “I want to see Hunter asked this question: Hunter, you know nothing about energy. You know nothing about China. You know nothing about anything, frankly. Hunter, you’re a loser. Why did you get $1.5 billion, Hunter?”

The $1.5 billion figure, according to a report last week in the New York Post, is a reference to a funding goal that Hunter’s business, in partnership with a Chinese company, had set in 2013, the same year that he had flown to China with his dad aboard Air Force Two and met with business associates. A photograph from the trip shows both Bidens posing with the Chinese businessmen on a golf course.

Normal person: Hmm, interesting. Can I hear more about that from the most powerful person in the world?

Chuck Todd: Nah, no need! Hunter Biden isn’t a public figure! You don't need to know about this.

It’s always a trip when the national media try to save their audiences from Trump by refusing to quote him or air his rallies. That's invariably a hint that they’re hiding something very good.

Remember when Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty said earlier this year that she would “pledge” that she would “never again quote, repeat or otherwise dignify any of the asinine nicknames that President Trump gives his adversaries”? Remember when Fox News refused to air a fantastic and factually accurate ad about immigrant-related crime in the heat of the 2018 midterm election? Remember when the liberal HuffPost in 2015 said it was relegating all coverage of Donald Trump to the “entertainment” section?

On his show Friday, Chuck Todd said that Trump’s “attack” on Hunter was “remarkable” but that he couldn’t “in good conscience amplify those attacks” because they “seemed to cross a line.” We know what that means. It means that Trump hit a little too close to home. All of Todd’s viewers should want to find out what he said.