Then tone down the hyperbole, e.g. "used needles and human shit everywhere throughout the city" in order to be taken for credible. You are better than that, IMO.
Years ago I attended a kind of 'town gathering', a fish fry in a nice family-owned restaurant where a noted polititian spoke about his platform. It was election time. Folks asked questions and he answered them. It was overall a polite atmosphere, few raised voices, no yelling, no ugly speaking.
The next day our newspaper ran an article about it. The writer characterized the restaurant as a "beer hall" and the verbal exchanges as a "bar fight." Clearly she was on the opposite side politically from the speaker, but she was the one assigned to cover it, so....
This educated me that one cannot always get accurate information from newspapers, and that was before Internet and all kinds of social media out there now.
Had I not been there myself I might have believed it to be just how it was written up. That's all.
Candy