that article is 9 months old and if you read the thread this is the NEW owner of Fox affiliate that has the dispute. They (Fox) pulled their programming off another channel in the market for that reason
The channel number (mapdown) doesnt make sense though.
Normally Dish uses the legit mapdown number. IN the case of a subchannel (as this is) they would use the digital number (what station the channel actually transmits on). In this case it would be 18.
Since the local station generally has the say-so on where these channels get assigned - since FOX was previously on 55, maybe their thinking was it would be easier for subs to find the "new" FOX channel being adjacent to them on 56.
But as you point out, since their digital assignment is on 18, & since most stations want their channel#'s to be in as low of range as possible, making it the HIGHEST ch# instead, doesn't make sense to me, either...