Media event perception in wartime: Legacy news and platform-mediated exposure during Israel’s January 2025 hostage-release broadcast

We examined the associations among legacy news exposure, platform-mediated exposure, and media event perception (MEP) during the January 19, 2025, Israel hostage-release broadcast. Integrating media event theory with construal-level theory, we tested whether psychological proximity, trust in legacy news media, and support for the exchange agreement were indirectly associated with MEP. An online survey of Israeli adults ( N = 506) conducted on January 20, 2025, measured the behavioral, cognitive, emotional, communal, and national dimensions of MEP. Both legacy news exposure and platform-mediated exposure were positively associated with MEP. Indirect association models indicated significant indirect associations via psychological proximity and trust. Psychological proximity yielded the largest indirect association in both models, whereas the trust pathway was larger for legacy news exposure. Support for the deal did not yield an indirect association when proximity and trust were included. These findings motivate a distinction between structural unity (shared attention) and substantive unity (shared eventness): a wartime broadcast can be watched simultaneously by a large national audience yet be experienced very differently across viewers, so that co-viewing does not by itself produce a shared sense of the event.