[chaose]

I never understood why the FCC made this 39% rule, why did they decide to do this? And why the FCC won't allow NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX and the CW to own all of their affiliates

I’m not sure if the big networks would even want to own all their affiliates. There are so many small media markets where running a station sometimes can be more of a community service rather than a business. I’m not saying they’re not making money, but they might not be all that interesting for a big corporation. And still today, there are some stations that are affiliated with more than one network (mostly via subchannels nowadays), so that probably wouldn’t work if they were owned directly by a network.