Ralph Evans responds to Sam Roggeveen:
You are quite right about the American tilt in the media.
An extreme case was in 2007 when Cyclone Gonu struck Oman. It was a category 5 super-cyclonic storm, in a desert country where such things are unknown. 600mm of rain fell in a day in Muscat, the capital, and there was 5-metre sea surge. Officially, 50 people were killed, but the real number may have been much larger. Gonu was the biggest natural disaster in Oman's history. There is a nice YouTube description of the event by a British teenager (see above). There are plenty of other graphic Youtube entries, like this. Wikipedia has a good account.
What did our media report? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It just didn't happen. I heard by e-mail (I have some connections there) and saw a story on the BBC, but our media chose not to report Gonu at all. Contrast this with the blanket coverage here of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, which was a category 3.