SINGER Lisa Marie Presley, the only daughter of Elvis Presley, blasted the media Friday for what she called “degrading stories” and “manipulated pictures” that forced her to go public with her pregnancy.

“Once they got a glimpse of my expanding physique a few days ago, they have been like a pack of coyotes circling their prey whilst eerily howling with delight,” Presley, 40, wrote on her blog at MySpace.com.

“Starting with a London publication and then New York and Chicago all writing false defamatory degrading stories about all of the dark possible reasons I could be putting on weight,” she added.

On Thursday, People magazine cited Presley’s publicist as saying the singer was pregnant and expecting a child in the fall with her fourth husband, musician Michael Lockwood, 46, and that the two were “incredibly overjoyed.”

The story was confirmation of the pregnancy after weeks of stories and pictures in various publications speculating on her weight gain.

In a MySpace posting entitled “Confirmation under the gun,” Presley writes that the tabloid stories forced her to “show my cards and announce under the gun and under vicious personal attack that I am in fact pregnant.”

Presley already has an 18-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son from her first marriage to musician Danny Keough. After that union ended in 1994, she briefly married Michael Jackson and then actor Nicolas Cage.

(SD-Agencies)