Leadership Quote by Willie Herenton

A politician warning the press not to manufacture stories is less a principled sermon than a stress test of trust: how broken does the information ecosystem have to be for a veteran of retail politics to admit he can’t sort fact from performance?

Herenton’s line works because it’s two accusations welded into one. “If the news isn’t there, don’t create it” is a direct charge of agenda-driven reporting, the kind that turns absence of evidence into a storyline anyway. That first sentence is disciplinary, almost parental: stop fishing for scandal; stop filling airtime with inference dressed as revelation. The second sentence pivots from critique to confession: “If I look at local news, I don’t know what’s real.” It’s an admission of epistemic fatigue from someone who, by job description, should be fluent in public narratives. That inversion is the power move. He’s not just calling journalists careless; he’s suggesting the whole local-news product has become indistinguishable from rumor, spin, and stitched-together outrage.

Context matters: local media lives on tight budgets and tighter attention cycles, which incentivize “content” over verification, conflict over clarity. Herenton is also a politician, which means the quote is self-protective as well as civic-minded. By casting uncertainty onto the newsroom, he preemptively discredits unfavorable coverage: if even he can’t tell what’s real, why should voters trust the next critical report?

The subtext is bleak: once local news loses credibility, it doesn’t just harm politicians or reporters. It hollows out the shared reality a city needs to govern itself.