Scott Pelley got himself fired to set up his next career move

Rachel Maddow joined the rally-round-Scott Pelley brigade Thursday night — a cavalcade of lefty support that shows why he felt the need to make CBS fire him.

Jimmy Kimmel, Margaret Sullivan, Robert Reich, Ben Rhodes, Jim Acosta, Tommy Vietor and many more damned the network and praised Pelley — because they all recognize him as a “newsman” sure to spin everything against Republicans and conservatives.

That’s MSNOW’s reason for existence: No wonder Maddow actually offered Pelley a job. 

Landing a new gig was plainly his plan when he engineered his own firing by calling his new bosses  “unwanted” and “murderer” at a staff meeting.

CBS’s owners brought in Bari Weiss (a left-leaning centrist!) as news chief to restore balance; she brought in award-winning journalist Nick Bilton (also no righty) to helm “60 Minutes” for the same reason.

But Pelley spent his career scoring cheap lefty points; he had no interest in changing his ways, so he defied management with a pose of standing on neutral principle against a supposed right-wing agenda, then followed his firing with a letter claiming Wiess wanted him to “inject falsehoods and bias” into his work at “60 Minutes.”

Not that he cited any specifics, because he couldn’t: Being told you need to get quotes from the other side before a new story is finalized, after all, is the reverse of bias.

Which puts a pretty damning light on Pelley’s posturing about how “the principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”

His “principles” involved lazy, biased reporting that he wasn’t going to be able to keep doing; he staged his exit to maximize his chances of getting a new gig doing the same old hack work, and will probably succeed.