For the first time since I can remember, the traditional news media and the students are on opposite sides of a big foreign policy dispute. The reason why college students all over the western world have taken the side of the Palestinians in the Gaza war, has a lot to do with what they read and watch. We would be complacent to reduce this phenomenon to the social media. The young live in a different media universe than we do. It is not nearly as well staffed as our traditional media, but much more alive and active. It has also become commercially more mature and stable. 

I was too young to remember the student protests in the late 1960s, but I know that media reports of the Vietnam war were an important source of information for the protesters. In late 1970s West Germany, the subject of my student-day outrage was US support for Latin American dictatorships. That, too, came from reports I had read in newspapers. The media were the most important source of my generation's geopolitical education. It is no accident that many student activists of that period turned to journalism in their professional careers. Journalism was the extension of the protest movement by other means. The authors I read at the time were John Pilger and Philip Knightley. Knightley's book The First Casualty has, for me, been the quintessential reference of how governments used journalists in their war propaganda. 

As modern governments are starting to discover, they are no longer in control of the message - because a new media sphere has opened up they hardly know, let alone control.

The traditional media did not necessarily support student demonstrators in the past either. But they did not put themselves into structural opposition to them. Maybe one of the reasons was that, unlike today, the students were readers back then. 

In Germany, there is currently a witch hunt going against anybody who utters even the slightest criticism of the German government's unconditional support for Israel. A group of over 300 academics from several universities in Berlin had signed a letter defending their and their students' democratic right of free speech. "In view of the announced bombing of Rafah and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the urgency of the protesters' concerns should also be understandable for those who do not share all the specific demands or do not consider the chosen form of action to be suitable," they wrote.

Bild, the mass circulation tabloid newspaper, caricatured them as Israel-hating agitators. Virtually all the stories in the rest of the German media about this letter were about the horrified reaction by a government minister. The signatories of that letter included an eminent historian of antisemitism in Germany, who himself ended up portrayed as antisemitic. 

I don't think that this is a standoff the old media will win. They need the young more than the young need them. I see no chance whatsoever that this current generation of young people will eventually become newspaper readers as previous young generations did. 

I was reminded of the gulf in media attitudes during a conversation with my oldest son about media bias. It was not until about five minutes into the conversation that I realised that he was talking about the social media. His generation calls it the media - without qualifying adjective. When they talk about newspapers, which they hardly ever do, they call it the legacy media. We are not just old. We are already dead.

When I asked a small group of first-year undergraduates at a British university whether any of them were reading newspapers or watched TV news programmes, there was not a single one who did. Even though none of them read newspapers, or watched the evening news, they were informed about what was going on in the world. It would be a complacent fallacy to think that young people are uninformed just because they don't read what we do. And even more complacent to think that they will grow out of this.

The social media not only offers a different gateway to the news, but to different news. Just go to X, formerly Twitter, and search for Gaza. There you find all the unfiltered images you cannot see in the traditional media. There are good reasons television broadcasters blot out faces of the dead. But it creates emotional distance. If you are young and see unfiltered footage of dying children for the first time, the effect can be profound. 

The media universe the young people inhabit is not only different from ours, it is also not the same as it used to be even five years ago. The characteristic of a free media is not the freedom to say what you like, but to do this professionally. Journalism is not a hobby. That is true for alternative forms of journalism too. It has become more mature.

The new alternative news universe out there is occupied by journalistic entrepreneurs, who operate in a variety of news formats - podcasts and interviews, live video streams, and news documentaries. What they have in common is that they produce material that television viewers and newspaper readers rarely get to see. I cannot produce a representative list of what the student demonstrations are looking at. A trend I am seeing is one of establishment journalists leaving their news organisations to set up their news news companies. One recent example is the US broadcaster Mehdi Hasan who set up his own news website, Zeteo, after his Sunday night show on MSNBC got axed. Hasan now gives a different perspective on the Middle Eastern conflict than he was able to vent on mainstream TV. There is a lot of hidden bias that lurks under the cloak of objectivity in traditional news media. Zeteo and other news start-ups are unashamedly biassed. When you are used to the well-coiffed presenters of the evening news, you would probably find this material raw. But therein lies its special appeal. 

Technology plays a big role. Some of the new political journalists come from the tech scene. The traditional media's interest in technology is usually confined to product reviews of the latest gadget, or laments about artificial intelligence.

One of the mega-stars in the techno-political sector is Lex Fridman, a computer scientist, tech broadcaster, and prolific interviewer of politicians and tech leaders. With a huge following on Youtube of almost 4m, he has pioneered a new interview style that I would struggle to compare with anything I have seen in traditional news media. The pace is slow. The interviews can last for two and a half hours. You won't find that on the BBC.

Technology is becoming an increasingly important journalistic tool itself. I was recently struck when I heard the story where an investigative reporter at Bellingcat, which calls its an independent investigative collective,  managed to track down a German terrorist, who had been on the wanted list for 30 years, through face recognition software. 

Bellingcat is another of these modern-age news organisations, straddling the worlds of alternative and established media. One of its great scoops was the discovery of a Novichok nerve gas attack against Alexei Nalvalny, the Russian pro-democracy leader, in 2020. But Bellingcat is as relentless on Russia as it is on Israel. One of its front pages stories this week was a report about abuses by the Israel Defence Force, quoting one member as saying that they had become addicted to explosions. Another story is about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Bellingcat is not mainstream. But it is a professional news organisation.

The traditional media are still better resourced, but they are declining. When newspaper print sales started to fall in the first decade of this century, online sales initially compensated for the decline. Newspapers were often caricatured as a licence to print money. The industry operated a dual oligopoly in the markets for readers and advertisers. Both could freely choose between a handful of competing titles, but had nowhere to go outside of the cartel. The cartel has given way to a competitive industry with low barriers of entry. 

Online sales of newspapers have also started to decline. The Washington-based Pew Research Centre noted that between the first quarter of 2021 and 2022 the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the top 50 US newspapers declined 20%, down from 11 million to 9 million. Print sales had fallen by two thirds since the heydays of the 1980s. 

The 2023 Digital News Report, published by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, contained a couple of astonishing observations about the divorce between young people and old media. In 2015 the proportion of people who accessed a news organisation's website directly was a little over 50% for all age groups. By the end of last year, that proportion had fallen to 24% among the 18-24 year olds, whereas it stayed unchanged among older adults. 

Another important trend is the choice of what to avoid. Among those who declared themselves selective news avoiders, the subject that ranks at the top of the avoidance scale last year among UK readers was Ukraine. The report said: "It is also striking to note the ambivalence, and possibly fatigue, over the war in Ukraine across all networks. Despite the topic’s importance, we find lower levels of attention when compared with fun news, national politics, or even news about business and economics."

A further unexpected detail is that active avoidance of Ukraine news was highest in countries closest to the conflict. This tells us that the disconnect between the political establishment and the young is just as high in eastern Europe as it is in the west.

The Biden administration, too, is struggling to sustain political support for its foreign policies amongst a young generation that has instant feedback on what happens after an Israeli bomb attack. It makes a difference whether your main news item of the day is a video clip of a dying child or a report of a senior US administration official struggling to explain the president's Israel policy. The media departments of the White House and other western governments are geared towards the traditional media - but they no longer reach an important segment of their voters.

We in the traditional media can express outrage about the protests at Columbia University, or letters written by academics in support of their students. We can mock the students, or worse, offer patronising sympathy. Chances are that they won't even hear what we are saying. We are talking to ourselves.