The pressure is building for NBC News’ Kristen Welker to address the ongoing scandal surrounding a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden during Thursday night’s final presidential debate as the mainstream media has essentially dismissed the story.

“This is a moment of truth for Kristen Welker and NBC News, in which they are caught between doing their job or protecting Joe Biden,” Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.

The laptop, which was first reported by the New York Post, is reported to contain emails suggesting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had knowledge of, and was allegedly involved in, his son’s foreign business dealings.

But the media has bent over backward to avoid the scandal, with Twitter and Facebook each coming under fire for censoring the Post bombshell and NPR even dismissed it as a waste of time.

The pressure isn’t just coming from one point either:

DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall agrees that Welker should ask about the Hunter Biden “elephant in the room” or she would open herself up to “criticism that she’s covering” for the Democratic nominee.

“Not because of what Hunter might or might not have done, but because of what Joe Biden’s role might have been, or at least his awareness of what Hunter might have been doing,” McCall told Fox News. “The mainstream media have steered away from this story, but the internet is churning it and it is surely on the minds of some voters. This matter would fit surely into the category of leadership that Welker has on her topic list.”

It’s great that Welker is being pressured to do this as she definitely should, but Welker shouldn’t be pressured because she shouldn’t have to be.

No one should have to be pressured to do their job.

The Biden family is definitely neck-deep in quite a few scandals with Hunter in the center and Joe not far off. Every other story that comes out tells the tale of a family using their name as leverage to gain millions of dollars and almost all of them contain political corruption in some form or fashion.

As a debate moderator, it shouldn’t be something that just happens to slip by during a debate between two men over who should lead the free world. This Hunter Biden story is arguably the biggest story in America right now and since it ties directly into one of the men standing on that stage, the question should come up.

Not doing so is going to make America’s take on the media much worse, and it’s already pretty bad, to begin with. Not only that, Welker’s own reputation is on the line.

I realize it’s second nature for the media to lean to the left due to decades of leftist infiltration, but even in this instance, there really isn’t any escape from the issue. Either Welker will bring it up here, or the subsequent blow-up over the story not being mentioned will redirect attention to it anyway, and accompanied by that will be the question on why Welker didn’t mention it.

It will be a national Streisand Effect.

We’re not asking Welker to do anything spectacular. We’re just asking her to do her job.