George Clooney laments the state of the news industry

George Clooney – the son of a journalist and a man who has had, quite possibly, more column inches devoted to his life than almost any other living actor – was asked to give his opinion on the media obsession with celebrity today . He admitted: "Any answer you give, you're dead, right?"

Clooney was facing journalists on day two of the London film festival ahead of the UK premiere of his film The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson's book of the same name.

He said he was sympathetic to journalists. "I'm the son of a newsman, I grew up around news," he said. "I can understand newspapers are losing subscribers. It's a tricky thing, you have to sell papers, I get it.

"The problem is that there is so little reporting any more, somebody will write a story and it will be in 1,800 different outlets and you have no recourse. It will be false and you'll go 'it's not true' and they'll go 'we're not saying that, we're saying a London tabloid has said it'. So they're just reprinting and reprinting things that aren't necessarily true.

"It used to be two reliable sources and that doesn't seem to exist any more. I understand the problem, I understand why it happens but it certainly is an issue."

Clooney's co-star, Kevin Spacey, was less sympathetic. He said: "I don't get it. I don't understand the notion of people who might call themselves journalists who would just make up stuff. I don't understand it as a function of a human being. I don't understand why that's of interest, to write something that is false. If you even bother to say 'that story has no whit of truth to it' they write that you denied that that story is true, which is not the same thing as saying what we wrote was absolutely wrong.

"There are some people who choose to fight these things in the courts and there are those who say 'you know what, it's yesterday's news, it's fish wrapping and I'm not going to worry about it'."

Clooney and Spacey spoke after yesterday's Guardian reported on a soon-to-be released film called Starsuckers in which the documentary makers fed false celebrity stories to newspapers and the majority found their way into print unchecked.

Ironically, Clooney and Spacey were facing journalists with the hope that they would get some column inches as they promoted their film, in which they star as members of a top-secret psychic military unit. Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, a man who can, he thinks, disperse clouds and kill goats by staring at them.