Comment by vundercind

There's a long-running genre of clickbaity story (that's been around since before "clickbait") that runs something like "America's five most dangerous cities!" and reads like the list of places many people believe are exceptionally-dangerous in the US (because of these stories...) but people consistently read them poorly (and media know this, so are basically lying on purpose, but big city names being on the list gets more attention, for multiple reasons, than if the list were mostly small cities).

The rhetorical trick here is the cut-off point. For one thing, you're limiting it to cities in the first place. For another, take a look to see where their cut-off for size of city under consideration is—the higher it is, the more it'll skew toward big names (duh) so they almost always set it pretty high, and the lower you make the cut-off, the farther (most) of those plummet down and off the list as small and mid-sized cities take over.