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The Brian Williams Guessing Game Begins

By sticking around to write a second act at MSNBC, Williams has positioned himself to write a third act somewhere else, and seemingly everything is on the table—except the CBS Evening News.

Brian Williams
Photo by Fernando Leon/Getty Images.
Dylan Byers
November 10, 2021

In early 2016, Andy Lack and Brian Williams sat down at Canaletto, a small, white-tablecloth Italian restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side, to hatch one of the greatest redemption efforts in the recent history of American news media.  Lack, who had presided over NBC News during its heyday in the 1990s, had just returned as chairman of NBC News and MSNBC. Williams, the storied Nightly News anchor and heir to Tom Brokaw, was still trying to claw his way back to respect and relevance after blowing up his career with blatantly false claims about his experiences covering the war in Iraq. After a six-month penance, he had assumed a new role anchoring breaking news and special reports for MSNBC, a considerable fall from the lofty heights of the evening news that left him untethered to any dedicated slot in the cable channel’s lineup.