Since the continuous reproduction of fake news is taking place in the digital media environment, critical reading education should be conducted. Critical thinking ability to analyze, evaluate, and read the information received through the media from a critical point of view is a core competency required as a ‘democratic citizen’ in order not to become an ‘unintentional fake news distributor’. Accordingly, as one of the various implementation methods of critical reading education in the digital age, the aspects and strategies of critical reading of fake news were studied. As a result of analyzing fake news reading patterns, first, in a natural situation, as an unsuspecting news consumer, receptive reading was performed, but in a discriminatory situation, critical reading was performed as a suspicious news consumer. Second, ancestral and sequential reading appeared in natural situations, but non-advanced and regressive reading appeared in discriminatory situations. Third, ‘Reading through’ was performed to understand the contents in natural situations, and ‘Reading meticulously’ was performed to utilize strategies in discriminatory situations. Reading strategies used by prospective teachers in the process of identifying fake news were analyzed in order of reliability, validity, and fairness. First, to verify reliability, prospective teachers used ‘checking provocative headlines’, ‘checking media information and baselines’, ‘checking dates’, ‘checking sources of citation information’, and ‘Checking photos, tables, graphs, etc’ as reading strategies. In addition, validation of validity was used to ‘check logical errors or leaps through the derivation of arguments from sufficient evidence’ and to ‘check for unnecessary information interventions and judge the consistency of news configurations’. Finally, in order to verify fairness, it used a strategy of ‘checking whether various positions related to the issue were reflected’. This study empirically confirmed the reading patterns of prospective teachers in the process of identifying fake news. Existing critical reading education is insufficient to cope with the increasingly sophisticated and serious fake news. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare specific educational contents and methods suitable for reading fake news.