The Brattleboro Reformer has covered the travails of RFB with remarkable fairness and depth, especially for a small-town newspaper. It must be at least party due to the success of RFB in making itself valuable to the community of Brattleboro.
On Friday the paper had a nice overview of the situation and the station’s legal argument against the FCC:
Previous court cases between pirate stations and the FCC centered around First Amendment issues — but lawyers for rfb are planning to argue that the FCC is not fulfilling its statutory mandate by offering a license for small 10-watt community radio stations.
“Indeed, here is an opportunity for the FCC to fulfill its mission; instead, the agency is spending taxpayer dollars shutting down and effectively placing a ban on micro radio,” Maxwell said in a court filing this week. “This is an abuse of discretion and a contravention of the agency’s statutory mandates.”