The theoretical stakes are considerable. Classical models of risk information-seeking, such as the Risk Information Seeking and Processing framework, predict that heightened perception of threat and elevated anxiety should drive people toward more frequent news consumption, particularly when the hazard is acute and personally relevant. Wartime would seem to be the ultimate test case: civilians face genuine, immediate danger, information changes by the hour, and the consequences of being uninformed can be lethal. If anxiety were going to shape media behavior anywhere, it should have been here. Yet when Ariel and Weimann-Saks ran their statistical models, the coefficients for both state anxiety — the temporary, situational apprehension people felt during the conflict — and trait anxiety — the stable dispositional tendency toward worry — were negligible. Equivalence tests confirmed that these associations fell below even a small effect size, meaning the null result was not merely a failure to detect a subtle signal but positive evidence that anxiety played essentially no substantive role in how often people consulted either platform.

The methodological design deserves close attention, because measuring psychological states during an active emergency is notoriously difficult. The researchers conducted a quota-matched online survey benchmarked to national population parameters, ensuring the sample mirrored the Israeli adult population on key demographics rather than skewing toward the young, digitally active respondents who typically dominate online panels. Of the 535 participants, 508 entered the final analytic models. Data collection took place during the week immediately after hostilities ceased in June 2025 — a window the authors describe as capturing responses while the experience was still vivid. Participants reported their state and trait anxiety using established psychometric scales, the frequency with which they used Telegram and television for war-related updates, and their perceived trust in each platform. Regression and mediation analyses then tested the pathways between anxiety, platform use, and trust. The study received ethics approval from the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College Ethics Committee, and all participants provided electronic informed consent before completing the survey.

The choice of Telegram versus television was deliberate, and it is what gives the study its analytical bite. The two channels differ sharply in institutional structure, editorial gatekeeping, and immediacy. Television in Israel operates through established broadcast organizations with professional editorial hierarchies, legal accountability, and — critically — a legacy of being perceived as a national information authority during emergencies. Telegram, by contrast, is an encrypted messaging platform where channels can be run by anyone from official government bodies to volunteer civilian groups, journalists, or anonymous aggregators. Content flows with minimal institutional filtering, updates arrive in real time, and during the conflict Telegram channels became a primary conduit for rocket alerts, shelter instructions, and unverified battlefield claims. The platform embodies the tension at the heart of modern crisis communication: maximum speed and accessibility, minimum gatekeeping.

Against this backdrop, the trust results are revealing. Trust in television exceeded trust in Telegram among the surveyed population, and — perhaps most interestingly — trust in the two platforms was statistically unrelated. That independence matters: it means people do not treat the two channels as substitutes on a single trust continuum, where faith in one would erode faith in the other. Instead, Israelis appear to hold platform-specific trust judgments, evaluating broadcast television and messaging-based channels against entirely different criteria. A viewer may grant television the authority of institutional verification while simultaneously valuing Telegram for raw immediacy, without the two assessments influencing each other. For emergency communicators, this finding suggests that trust cannot be managed as a unified national resource; each channel cultivates its own relationship with its audience.

The strongest quantitative association in the study linked media use and trust — and it was considerably stronger for Telegram than for television. People who used a platform more frequently for war-related updates trusted it more, and the Telegram association outpaced the television one by a clear margin. The cross-sectional design, as the authors are careful to note, cannot establish the direction of that relationship. Two readings are plausible. The first is a use-trust reinforcement loop: engaging with a channel during a crisis builds familiarity, and familiarity breeds confidence, a mechanism consistent with media-dependency theory in which reliance on a source during high-uncertainty periods strengthens its perceived credibility. The second is selection: people who already trusted Telegram used it more. Both dynamics may operate simultaneously, and disentangling them would require longitudinal or experimental designs. Either way, the practical implication is the same — engagement and trust in wartime are tightly coupled, and the coupling is stronger for the newer, less institutionalized channel.

Why did anxiety fail so completely as a predictor? The authors suggest that in a high-threat context, anxiety may be so uniformly elevated across the population that it loses its discriminative power — when everyone is frightened, individual differences in fear no longer sort people into different information-seeking behaviors. There is also a ceiling effect of sorts on behavior itself: during an existential emergency, consulting news is not an optional coping strategy but a civic default, something nearly everyone does regardless of psychological disposition. The study’s context rule reinforces this reading. The June 2025 conflict disrupted electricity, telecommunications, and transportation systems, meaning information-seeking was a practical necessity for navigating daily life — checking on family, locating shelters, understanding which areas were under threat — rather than an anxiety-driven impulse. In such conditions, the structural demands of the situation may simply overwhelm individual emotional variation.

The findings carry substantial implications for wartime risk communication strategy. Governments and emergency agencies often assume that anxious populations need more reassurance and more information, and they design messaging campaigns around psychological arousal. This study suggests that assumption is misplaced, at least in acute, high-threat contexts. What matters instead is platform-specific trust: understanding which channels different audiences already believe, and investing in the engagement that reinforces that belief. For television, the trust advantage appears durable — institutional editorial gatekeeping still confers credibility that messaging platforms lack. For Telegram, the stronger use-trust association suggests that official presence on the platform, if sustained and reliable, can convert frequent users into trusting ones. Agencies that ignore messaging channels because they lack institutional pedigree may forfeit the audience segment where engagement most powerfully builds confidence.

There are limits the authors acknowledge. The survey was conducted in a single country, during a single conflict, within one week of its end — a snapshot rather than a film. Trust and use were measured simultaneously, so causality remains open. Anxiety was assessed retrospectively in a post-conflict window, and state anxiety during the fighting itself may have differed from what participants reported afterward. The sample, while population-benchmarked, was drawn from an online panel, which may underrepresent the least digitally connected citizens. Still, the study is among the first to test anxiety-trust pathways with psychometric rigor during an actual wartime emergency, and its null result on anxiety is as informative as any positive finding would have been. As conflicts increasingly unfold across hybrid media systems — where broadcast authority coexists with encrypted, decentralized channels — the lesson is clear: wartime trust is not a single dial to be turned by managing public emotion, but a set of platform-specific relationships, each demanding its own engagement strategy.

Subject of Research: Pathways to trust in wartime risk communication: the role of state and trait anxiety and platform engagement on Telegram versus television

Article Title: Pathways to trust in wartime risk communication: the role of state and trait anxiety and platform engagement on Telegram versus television

Article References: Ariel, Y., & Weimann-Saks, D. (2026). Pathways to trust in wartime risk communication: the role of state and trait anxiety and platform engagement on Telegram versus television. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09512-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09512-x

Keywords: Pathways, trust, wartime, risk, communication, role, state, trait, anxiety, platform, engagement, Telegram