White space carries unintended meaning in a print advert

21st Century Business Herald, April 19, 2010, page 9

When readers of the 21st Century Business Herald opened up to page 9 on April 19, they saw half a page of white space, as if a story had been scrubbed just before press time.

Page 9 was devoted to a feature on Chongqing, which has for the last few months been carrying out a high-profile campaign against corruption and mob activity, so it was not hard to imagine that the paper may have run afoul of the censors.

The practice of leaving white space in place of material that has been censored rather than filling it with advertising or other content is known as 开天窗 (“putting in a skylight”). A bold move that makes it clear to the reader that something has been omitted, leaving a skylight is not common and is usually used to make a statement.

China’s bishops used the strategy when, after considerable deliberation, they deleted a reference to Communism from Paragraph 2425 of their edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Han Han is rumored to have insisted on it for any stories that get pulled from his as-yet-unreleased magazine Band of Soloists.

But Page 9 of the 21st Century Business Herald is not actually a “skylight.” Instead, the white space is part of an advertisement for an Intel processor: by confining the content to a small box at the bottom right corner of the page, the layout itself suggests the processor’s low power consumption. Other publications ran the piece as a full-page ad, where it bears less of a resemblance to a censored story.

Ironically, a number of commenters who were taken in by the ad contrasted it with the “fake skylight” that the Southern Weekly ran beneath its interview with US President Obama last November. The bottom half of the first two pages of that issue were given over to simple ads promoting the newspaper, leaving readers wondering whether anything important had been deleted.