Problematic News Consumption and Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Health: A Replication Study.

McLaughlin, Gotlieb, and Mills introduced the concept of problematic news consumption (PNC) in their 2023 study, finding that those classified as having severely problematic news consumption (16.5% of the sample) exhibited significantly greater levels of mental and physical ill-being. These results were the product of a single cross-sectional survey, however. Using a two-wave longitudinal survey, we sought to replicate their findings. In the current study, we found support for the factor structure of the PNC scale and the 4-profile solution, although the severely problematic news consumption profile represented a substantially smaller portion of the sample (7.5%) than in the initial study. Additionally, we found support for greater levels of mental and physical ill-being among those in the severely problematic news consumption profile in the Wave 1 cross-sectional model. However, while we found greater levels of mental ill-being among these participants in the autoregressive model, we did not find greater levels of physical ill-being.