Sonic Jam commentaries tell all~

I'm wondering if maybe whatever special stage they were showing the magazines didn't have a sprite yet, so they just blanked out the location where they would have gone to prevent a garbled mess from being displayed (made the sprite transparent), leaving no sprite. The Magazine, not seeing Sonic, assumes it's first person.

This assumes that, had it been finished, the camera would remain oriented to Sonic while the half pipe rotates on around them, mode 7 style. I'm not very failier with the Sega CD's mode 7 style rotation, but on the SNES, anything to be rotated like that has to be in the backround.

This is pure speculation.