Abstract:

As broadcasters and recipients, we already know a lot about the criteria of information selection, we recognize why some topics are interesting and some are not. What's more, we are able to follow both the journalistic process of selecting information and its impact on the social reception of the news. The theory of news values, formulated for the first time in 1965 by two Norwegian researchers Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge, underwent over the years - in connection with new journalistic genres and the Internet revolution - numerous modifications. All concepts of news values, however, relate to the assumption of real information. Basing the message on the facts is the basic feature of the news. Meanwhile, recently we have been dealing with the emergence of fake news. The entire branch of disinformation portals, generators of false information or social media posts has grown on the Internet.

Fake news are constructed in such a way that they pretend to be real information. This phenomenon has negative consequences not only in the realm of media and communication. Even more worrisome effect it can have for education on every level. Students for years have treated Internet resources as an important and, up to date, generally credible source of information and data. Distraction of the reliability of news leads to negation of reliability of the Internet sources of information in general, and therefore to less trustworthy network sources for education and e-learning.

The aim of our work was to determine how the concept of news values ​​relates to fake news. We have examined which news value principles - developed by Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge - are broken by fake news and what makes fake news treated as real news. In other words - what elements determine their value for recipients. False, inaccurate or manipulated information has always existed, but today, thanks to the Internet, they have an incredible power of destruction. Therefore, learning about the mechanisms of their creation and spreading becomes more important for researchers and media recipients, but also for educators.

Our two-level experimental research with additional post-test survey was based on mixed qualitative-quantitative  methodology. Subject of the study were several groups of media recipients, social media users and students divided into control and research groups.

As a result of the research the typology of fake news was proposed. Furthermore, the experimental research confirmed the hypothesis about correlation between most noticeable news values in fake information and those that induce the strongest dissonance in the recipient.

The main conclusion of the research is that fake news have a very mimetic character so that they imitate real information so well that it is possible to indicate specific news values that are broken by the false of the information. Because the value of news is strongly related to the reliability of educational sources of information in the network, this result shows the basic threats from the side of fake news on both traditional, and especially distance education.

Keywords:

Fake news, news values, social media, Internet, new media, online education, online learning, media learning.