The fallacy of misleading vividness occurs when anecdotal reasoning involves dramatic and intense narratives to move an audience away from the overall statistical trend of a phenomenon. The fallacy usually involves an appeal to emotion.

It is a very frequent practice in controversies over social problems. For example:

A politician fails to mention that teen murders year-over-year are substantially down in her State, and instead says:

"A fourteen year-old killed a twelve year-old last June with a baseball bat. And six weeks ago, a thirteen year-old shot her classmate with a stolen gun. From these events you can see how childhood murders are out of control in our State and we need to pass my proposed bill right now."

The problem is that those two particular anecdotes could be true even though teen-on-teen murders are down overall. And there is nothing about those unfortunate stories that proves the particular bill being proposed will be successful in mitigating the problem. Accurate statistics about the larger population, and point-by-point explanation of the bill, are needed in order to properly assess its merits.