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CNN announced on Wednesday that its chairman and CEO Chris Licht is leaving the media conglomerate after a tumultuous year on the job. While searching for a replacement, CNN will be led by a trio of CNN veterans: Amy Entelis, its executive vice president of talent and content development, Virginia Moseley, its executive vice president of editorial, and Eric Sherling, executive vice president of U.S. programming.
With a two-thirds female leadership triad, CNN joins every other major U.S. news organization as being woman-led. The presidents of all major networks are women; Kimberly Godwin helms ABC News, Rashida Jones heads MSNBC, Rebecca Blumenstein leads NBC News, Wendy McMahon leads CBS News, and Suzanne Scott leads Fox News.
The tides have long been turning in the media. The New York Times’ CEO is a woman (Meredith Kopit Levien), and women are currently editors-in-chief at The Washington Post (Sally Buzbee), The Wall Street Journal (Emma Tucker), Reuters (Alessandra Galloni), McClatchy (Robyn Tomlin), and, yes, Fortune (Alyson Shontell).
But work still remains. Just 22% of the top editors at major news outlets worldwide are women, a recent University of Oxford study found, despite the fact that 40% of journalists in the 12 major news markets are women. The U.S. is much better than the average; 44% of top editors here are women. Plus, for the first time ever, over 10% of the Fortune 500 are run by female CEOs.
Many promotions of women to the C-suite—namely CNN’s, where ratings have cratered recently—may be prime examples of a glass cliff, the phenomenon where “a female executive is only given the top job in an impossible situation—whether that’s a time of crisis or when failure is all but certain.”
Often, executives consider women as the right choice to clean up a corporate mess, but a poor fit during strong periods, Emma Hinchliffe wrote in Fortune’s Broadsheet in April after Bed Bath & Beyond replaced its outgoing CEO, Mark Tritton, with board member Sue Gove. In the three years Tritton helmed the retail giant, its stock price plummeted almost 50%. Six months after Gove took over, the home goods chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Gove is far from the only high-profile example of the glass cliff phenomenon; Hinchliffe pointed to Marissa Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo, Jill Soltau’s at J.C. Penney, and Heyward Donigan’s at Rite Aid.
At CNN, it remains to be seen whether Entelis will take over officially—insiders claim it could be likely—but she will have substantial crisis management work to inherit if she does. “We have great confidence in this group and will fully support them until a new CEO is named,” David Zaslav, CEO of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, said in an internal statement to CNN employees. “We are in good hands, allowing us to take the time we need to run a thoughtful and thorough search for a new leader.”
