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

Armed conflicts generate intense demands for real-time risk information; however, little is known about how anxiety shapes civilians’ media use and trust during acute wartime threats. This study examined whether state and trait anxiety were associated with news media use and trust during the June 2025 Israel–Iran war, a 12-day conflict involving extensive cyber operations and damage to civilian infrastructure that disrupted electricity, telecommunications, and transportation systems. The study focused on Telegram and television, two channels that differ sharply in institutional structure, editorial gatekeeping, and immediacy. A quota-matched online survey of Israeli adults (N = 535; N = 508 for the analytic models), benchmarked to national population parameters, was conducted during the week immediately following the conflict. Participants reported state and trait anxiety, frequency of using Telegram and television for war-related updates, and perceived trust in each platform. Regression and mediation analyses tested associations between anxiety, platform use, and trust. Contrary to expectations derived from risk information-seeking models, anxiety was not a substantive predictor of media use on either platform; the coefficients obtained for state and trait anxiety were negligible, and equivalence tests placed these associations below a small effect. Media use was positively associated with trust in both platforms, and considerably more strongly for Telegram, although the cross-sectional design cannot establish the direction of that association. Trust in television exceeded trust in Telegram, and trust in the two platforms was unrelated. In this high-threat context, platform use was more closely related to trust than anxiety was, suggesting that wartime risk communication must account for platform-specific trust rather than assuming uniform anxiety-driven information-seeking.