Near the end of the Sky Sports news programme Through The Night, the hosts always flip through the back pages of the British daily newspapers to point out the headlines of what the morning papers are saying. It’s a standard news segment on their show. Except for what happened last night.

When the hosts last night showed the back page of The Daily Express newspaper, they discussed the main headline about how Rio Ferdinand said that England was a circus under Sven-Goran Eriksson because of the WAGs. With the Sky Sports camera zoomed in on the back page, what was very noticeable was that the bottom left corner of the newspaper had been ripped out.

Thinking this was strange, I visited the Daily Express newspaper’s website to see what was on the back page that was so offensive.

And boom, there it was. It was an advertisement from Setanta Sports advertising the Irish company’s coverage of the Belarus against England World Cup qualifier. The main picture above shows the back cover of the newspaper, while the inset picture clearly shows the section of the back page removed from the newspaper as it appeared on Through The Night.

How immature and unprofessional must Sky Sports be that they won’t even allow a tiny Setanta Sports print advertisement to be shown for a few seconds on their TV network? Part of the issue for Sky must be that they’re concerned about losing subscribers to Setanta Sports, but this isn’t the way to go about it. It makes the network look stupid, juvenile and – frankly – it shows how biased and unobjective the show is.

This isn’t the first time that Sky Sports has clearly avoided giving their competitors any publicity. When Sky doesn’t have the TV rights to massive sports competitions such as Euro 2008 or the Summer Olympics, the Through The Night show either completely ignores the massive sport news from those tournaments or relegates the news to the third or fourth story. Also, when BBC’s Panorama broke the news about the bung scandal, the Through The Night programme didn’t mention a single word about the massive story for a couple of days. And when the show did finally mention the story, it was buried deep so to give the BBC as little publicity as possible.