In both book and movie it's the media that finally blow the lid off Amity's cover up, just as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed Nixon to be a political shark. In the movie Peter Benchley himself cameos as a TV reporter - momentarily breaking the fourth wall by addressing the camera - and delivers his lines with just the right amount of earnestness.
With his own newspaper background it's not surprising that Benchley should populate his story with newsmen: apart from local newspaper editor Harry Meadows, there is Bill Whitman, a reporter for The New York Times, and Bob Middleton "from Channel Four News".
The newspaperman and - less commonly - woman has long been a convenient stock movie character for digging up dirt. From the shadowy figure of Thompson in Citizen Kane to the milk-drinking Joe Frady of The Parallax View, the hard-boiled, fast-talking reporter has doggedly followed leads through the noir landscape of American film. In the year Jaws was published the crusading reporter was given hagiographic tribute in All the President's Men.
In the novel the Times reporter, who happens to be on the beach when Alex Kintner is attacked, introduces himself as Bill Whitman, but, with a nice hint of self-importance, signs his by-line William F. Whitman. Although he reappears briefly in the final chapter, he remains a thin secondary character who doesn't make it to the final film. He simply files his copy and then fades into the background. His reporting skills are competent and he serves up the facts with journalistic precision ("At least fifteen persons witnessed the attack on Morris Cater, 65, which took place at approximately 2 P.M. a quarter of a mile down the beach from where young Kintner was attacked."). The boy's death is described in a much less lurid manner than Benchley's although there is a hint of violence in the description of the "traces of blood found on shreds of [the] rubber [raft] .." - an image that is preserved in the film. True to the motto emblazoned on its masthead, the Times bowdlerises Hendricks's description of the shark, which is now "as large as a station wagon."
The second article from The Amity Leader is couched in slightly more sensational prose and Meadows is not afraid to reach for the cliche jar: the victims were "brutally slain .... as they frolicked in the chill waters..."; Hendricks's failed rescue of Morris Cater is described as "a valiant attempt".
Although Benchley makes an effort to distinguish the two different styles of the newspapers, there is no separate font to distinguish the text of the articles from the text of the novel. We read them with Brody, interrupted by his reactions and Meadows's exegesis on the Machiavellian workings of the newspaper trade.
Meadows and Brody are themselves interrupted by Mrs Kintner - making an earlier vengeful appearance than she does in the film - and, in a telling detail, she slaps Brody across the face not with the palm of her hand but with a rolled-up newspaper.
