The Fallacy of Accent Revisited

How many women are broken into the brothels of Lahore every month? How many women are trafficked into secular Pakistan and raped into whoredom?

We don't know.

But we know that one woman was whipped by the Taliban: and since this video was circulated throughout the world, it seemed that the Taliban are serial whippers.
This single video clip was enough to galvanise Pakistan public opinion against the Taliban, and in favour of the military action against men, women and children. M.J.Akbar devoted an entire column to refute there can be anything as a 'moderate Taliban' – on the strength of the solitary video clip.

Yet nobody has ever filmed the goings-on at the Lahore brothels.

Behavioural psychologists have dubbed this the "availability heuristic": "The availability heuristic tends to bias our interpretations, because the ease with which we can imagine an event affects our estimate of how frequently that event occurs. Television and newspapers, for example, tend to cover only the most visible, violent events. People therefore tend to overestimate incidents of violence and crime as well as the number of deaths from accidents and murder, because these events are most memorable (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). As with all cognitive shortcuts, a biased judgment occurs, because the sample of people and events that we remember is unlikely to be fair and full."

The Fallacy of Accent

The fallacy of accent is a favourite of connoisseurs of informal fallacies. The classic example runs as follows.

It is the story of the captain and the first mate. The captain, a stout teetotaler, and the first mate, an inveterate old toper, got along miserably on board. Exasperated with his bibulous subaltern, the captain entered the following in the log: ‘The mate was drunk today’. The mate discovered this and got his own back by recording, when it was his turn to enter the log: ‘The captain was sober today’.


More sinister is the caption under a photograph of two women in chador and sunglasses, laughing at the camera: Not gloom and doom all the time. The implication of gloom and doom almost every living second (except when photographed by a western journalist) in a Muslim country is artfully suppressed.
The most recent example I’ve found is from the inside pages of The Economist (25th April 2009):

“Globalisation, of course, requires global news. But Sir John[Maddox] was equal to that. Henry Gee, another protégé, recalls a trick that Sir John called the “Afghanistan Effect”. “You write a little news story that says that nothing much has happened in Afghanistan, and people think ‘Goodness! Nature has coverage of Afghanistan’.”

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13525812

If the reader finds any other instances of the fallacy of accent, please do let me know.