By the Seventies television had become firmly established as the prime news medium of America. National trsgedies and triumphs were broadcast live into the nation's living rooms and everybody 'was getting lost in that hopeless little screen.' Lyndon Johnson was of the opinion that the images of war from Vietnam - known as the first television war - had a profound effect on the way the conflict was perceived at home. When Walter Cronkite called for a U.S withdrawal after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the President said, 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country.'
When Hollywood started to make movies about Vietnam towards the end of the Seventies, the film or TV camera crew quickly became a trope of the genre, allowing characters to break 'the fourth wall' and look directly into the camera. In Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola himself appears in a cameo as a filmmaker, shouting directions to combat soldiers ('Don't look at the camera! Keep moving!'). In Full Metal Jacket the camera operator at the open Vietnamese grave is director Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian.
In Jaws the TV reporter cameo went to author Peter Benchley, whose broad shoulders and thick-framed glasses made it look as if Clark Kent from The Daily Planet had wandered onto Amity's South Beach. Perfectly cast though he is, it's unlikely that Benchley would have thought to write himself a walk-on part when he was working on the manuscript. In the movie the TV reporter is never named and has only a few seconds of screen time. In the book he introduces himself as "Bob Middleton, Channel Four News", and, like The New York Times journalist Bill Whitman from Chapter Four, he seems preoccupied with his own self-importance ("Wait'll I think of something profound to say.").
The cameraman gets lucky and shoots some dramatic footage of the shark ("a sharp blade of brownish gray that hovered in the water") as Jim Prescott staggers out of the water. Middleton tries to manipulate the moment ("Can we do that again?"), but has to make do with a mess of footage and an uncooperative interviewee in Chief Brody. Lester Kraslow, who has come all the way from Queens to see the shark, is unimpressed. "Didn't look like much to me, just a fin [.....] I bet the whole thing was a put-on for them TV guys."
Kraslow's scepticism was very much of its time. As TV audiences had grown more sophisticated in their understanding of the medium, so suspicions of manipulation had become commonplace. Back in 1957 the British current affairs programme Panorama had been able to fool its viewers with an April 1st broadcast about the Italian spaghetti harvest. But by 1974 television audiences had become jaded and suspicious - nothing, it seemed, was what it seemed. That year Bill Kaysing published We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle and was the first to suggest that the moon landings had been faked. There were even sceptics who started the rumour that the landings had been filmed on a Hollywood soundstage by Stanley Kubrick, an idea which itself was adapted into a movie. Given Kubrick's penchant for multiple takes and extended shooting schedules, this particular conspiracy theory seems more unlikley than most.
