Media educational potential of satire in the digital environment: ridiculing credibility

The novelty of the study is justified by the need to clarify the functionality of satire in online media. A media educational approach to the study of modern satirical projects is presented. This approach opens up yet another avenue for exploring the formation of critical thinking in the audience. The subject of the study is media projects that continue the mission of satirical publications in the network era and are built on intentional factual errors. The relevance of the research is due to the formulation of a concept that explains the nature of the functioning of media in the modern world, which allows us to correlate professional practices with scientific theories. The aim of the study is to study the media educational potential of satire in online media, to search for adequate characteristics of the phenomenon of online satire, which is associated with the expansion of the modern empirical base. To achieve the goal of the study, satirical projects that ridicule their own authenticity were analyzed: IA “Panorama”, “Intersax”, the Internet project “RYBINSKon-Line”, the online publication “Fognews”, “The Onion”. The methods used in the course of the study include system analysis, including comparative and textual approaches. The conclusions are drawn that the news in these projects is a genre of parodic satire and most often imitates typical news patterns, less often the individual style of individual media. Such satirical publications are created according to the laws of news texts and contain both reliable and fake information, which creates a kind of game with the reader, in which he must become a fact checker and independently analyze the reliability.