Not necessarily...For what? From the TECHNICAL standpoint, Dish does remove the channels. Dish employees actually have hit the button/throw the switch to turn off/on a channel. Granted, they're doing it on orders from the local, but I consider it a true statement (although decidedly "spin").
I remember a few times programmers have deauthorized DISH's satellite decoders for those stations before DISH actually took them off the air.