During crises, television news channels often intensify competitive “attention-capture” marketing, such as quick-breaking news packaging, emotionally loaded tickers, patriotic framing, exclusive claims, and heavy studio debates. This paper studies how such crisis-time marketing affects viewer behavior (attention/time spent, channel switching, perceived credibility) and whether trust differs by age group for prominent Indian TV news brands (NDTV, Aaj Tak, India TV, ABP News) during Operation Sindoor. Industry reporting indicates a sharp spike in TV news consumption during the operation, with news viewership reaching 507 million and accounting for ~16% of TV viewing during critical days, far above the usual baseline.

Using a structured questionnaire and inferential tests (independent-samples t-test, one-way ANOVA), the study finds statistically significant age-based differences in (i) trust in NDTV and (ii) crisis-time viewing minutes, while trust in Aaj Tak shows no significant age-group variation in the demonstrated model..