Be creative, like me, and change your address to receive the local channels you want. Dish has two parts to a customer's address. One billing address and one where the dish is located. Keep your billing address the same and just get creative with where your dish is located.
Story time...
I signed up in November 2006 for service, promised distant locals, charged for them, and a week later, they were turned off. I canceled cable before hand and had to live without ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX before I got creative with my address and put myself in a local channel market to regain my local channels. I went with Dish, instead of Direct because of the local channel situation at that time without knowing what they had in-store for me.
Corporate knew way ahead of time about the Florida ruling and what they had to do legally, but did they relay that information to the telephone reps? HECK NO, not even a week before when I signed up! The reps found out exactly when the customers did, when the company turned them off! That's what you call, a company just looking to make money.
After reviewing the documents from all sides of the Florida court system, it took me about a total of 20 minutes myself to fix the problem. I even attempted many times to contact Dish about my answer to the entire problem. Do you think they wanted to hear from me? NO, and I am even trained in this area with 12 years of college! Instead of paying the money, all sides wanted which would have been many many millions of dollars, they were trying to pull a fast one and get customers involved and have them contact their state's representatives. So, that Congress would step in and fix the problem for free!
Do you really want "distant local channels", from NY, Denver, or California? I would say no, you would really want news from at least near you. So, ditch the "distant local channels" idea. It's just another CHEAP way around the Florida ruling.
So, thinking like Dish network dirt but also staying legal…
Check for addresses near you that are in a local channel market since you can check to see if a certain address is in a local channel market on the webpage. Then call'em up, and change your address to that. My excuse was, our local area changed our address due to the 911 service. Just do not change your billing address and you will receive any mailings they send you.