It’s getting to be a trend that celebrities announce they are engaged, they even provide details about the ring (in the case of Nick Cannon and Selita Ebanks, a $300,000 15 carat white and pink diamond ring from Jacob the Jeweler, more…) and before long you are told they were never really engaged. Someone claimed to have access to the private area of Selita’s myspace page and they let the cat out of the bag. She allegedly wrote the following (misspellings included):

I HAVE TO CLEAR UP SOMETHING…..SELITA ENGAGED? NO WAY I must tell you, everyone thinks Nick and I are engaged but yet we are really not…I had to talk to him after the proposal because I felt he didn’t really do it for the right reasons…it was like a publicity stunt and all..I didn’t to much care for it at all…all I did was hug him and whispered in his ear “We truly need to talk for sure!…Which we did and this is why I’m not engaged right now! Thanks to you all for the blessings but I’m sorry the media had lead you astray! Don’t believe the hype of the media!

Ah, you think….these celebrities are something else. How could the media possibly get this so wrong… Or did they just “hype” everything. Well, Nick Cannon has the engagement plastered on his web site, and they had picture after picture taken with an engagement ring on the model. Nick did propose to her in Times Square in public. Heck, they even had an engagement party.

Well guess what? It was a hoax. Here is Selita’s real myspace page. This is why it’s important to have real journalists out there. Bloggers just repeat stories all over the place without doing more serious fact checking required of serious journalists.

While it can be good in some ways to have blogger journalists, because there are more eyes watching, on the other hand, blogging is not a replacement for trained reporters paid to dig deeply into a story.

YouTube story on Nick Cannon proposal after the jump