Media can stare at itself all it likes, but it takes sitting across the table from today's news monster to really see what journalism has become. In a fascinating diagram, director Jason Reitman has pretty much broken it down.

Posting his chart on twitter, Reitman breaks down all the questions he's been asked in his Up In the Air press appearances. Shown in full the chart demonstrates first of all what a deadening experience it must be, sitting in junkets and having to answer, by his count, a full 111 times, "What's it like working with George Clooney?"

However, pulling up the number two slot, the world's entertainment journalists, sparked by the big contemporary issues raised by Up in The Air, asked Reitman 96 times about the economy. No doubt these were probing questions posed by the hard-nosed financial analysts of Ok! and Hello! to the director of Juno; questions we imagine along the lines of "So the economy,...isn't that just awful?" and "What does George think of the economy?" and "If the Federal Reserve were an ice cream store, what would be its most popular flavor?"

But hey, maybe those are just the sort of questions we need to be asking if this nation is ever going to think its way out of this mess.