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"One bad apple spoils the whole barrel."
When it comes to fans of certain things, there are many people who are sane, down-to-earth individuals; individuals who understand that if they talk about a subject, and the other person's not interested, they'll stop talking about it. These people know how to keep their hobbies under control; how to differentiate between reality and their interests.
Unfortunately, these people are not news. That's because Weird Is Interesting - Like any other program on television, the news has to be interesting or else people won't watch it. Why talk to an individual who works in an office, who occasionally picks up a copy of Spider-Man, when you can talk to the 300-pound guy who spent $7000 on his exact replica of a Scarecrow costume?
The problem is that because only the weirdos get interviewed, this causes non-fans to believe they're all like that; that all comic fans are clones of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, for example. This is also the main reason why people would hate something just because of its fanbase. It's like the old saying: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease".
Not just limited to Comic Books, this phenomenon extends to other hobbyists, other groups and races as well. Although there can be odd immunities: compare how your average American treats a guy in a Spock costume versus how he treats a guy with his face painted the team colors.
Sadly, this concept serves very well for Chewbacca Defense. Someone complain about you doing something wrong? Stigmatize them as Vocal Minority – you instantly prove they are wrong and make it look like everything is alright and everyone agrees with you on this, and complainers delude themselves thinking otherwise. That is Argumentum ad hominem, but what is more important – history tends to avert this entirely; i.e the mere fact that someone complains really hard means something is going very, very wrong. The poem “First they came…”— Commonly used idiom when it comes to a person's perception of a group upon seeing its Vocal Minority.
 by Martin Niemöller is all about supporting this point of view. It’s about Nazis. Specifically it's about how groups unhappy with Hitler's rise of power (like communists or trade unionists) were considered Vocal Minority so no one really cared about their persecution and imprisonment. You know what happened next.
Due to the nature of this trope, many fandom-related tropes are induced solely by this. The only members of a fandom who vocalize their opinion are the ones who feel so strongly about their opinion that they feel the need to vocalize it. The Scrappy, the Ensemble Darkhorse, the Fan Dumb, the Hate Dumb, Fan Preferred Couple, etc., are all based on what is commented on by the Vocal Minority. So, characters like Scrappy Doo and films like Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen both sound like the spawn of Satan when described by people on the internet, but usually have a much more positive description via Word of Mouth (in other words, asking someone on the internet about the two will get long winded rants, asking a guy on the street will get much more praise than on the internet). So, Scrappy Doo and Wesley Crusher could have very well been fairly well liked by the silent majority. However, just because they're the Minority, doesn't mean they're a small group: In large fandoms, the minority could number in the thousands.
Pandering to the Base is when the Vocal Minority gets preferential treatment over the rest of the fans. A Broken Base rises when two groups of Vocal Minority members have opposing opinions hitting against one another. Contrast with Silent Majority. See also Stop Being Stereotypical.
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alternative title(s): Vocal Minorities
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