Andrew Lack Returns to NBC News Amid Turmoil

By all appearances, Andrew Lack’s return to the top job at NBC News has gone smoothly.

Sometime soon, Lack and Steve Burke, NBCUniversal’s chief executive, will make the critical decision on Brian Williams’s fate. They could return him to the “Nightly News” anchor chair he was forced to vacate in February for exaggerating a war story. They could part ways with him or they could find another role for him at NBC. At this point, the likelihood of his return as anchor looks increasingly remote, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, and the network is trying to determine what else he might do if he remained at NBC. For Lack, 68, Williams’s implosion provided an opening to return to the place where he enjoyed the most celebrated time of his career, when he guided the news division through its best days in the 1990s. In the 12 years since he left the company, he took executive roles at Sony, Bloomberg and, briefly, Voice of America, but hasn’t been able to recapture the same magic.