I agree with zuch but given the current circumstances, it isn't a big story in the US.  Nobody will even remember a cyclone anywhere after 1/1/09.  Hurricane Ike, maybe.

98%(my number...no facts to back that up) of Americans probably can't locate Myanmar within 1,000 miles. So while the country is unimportant to American concerns, it should never be a minor story when 22,000 lives are so abruptly lost. This tragedy did expose to the world some of the human rights issues that are going on in Myanmar, but talk about this nation and its problems has died down over the summer.

The Myamar government may be the worst government in the world-they even make George W. look competent. There is no need to have that many die in a cyclone or similiar storm because weathe bureaaas see them coming days in advance.

I actually think that this disaster might be the straw that breaks the camels back for the military junta that currently rules Myanmar, or Burma.  They made a major tactical blunder by not warning its citizens that a major hurricane was bearing down on the country.  Given that Burma mostly sits below sea level, much of its population are extremely exposed to the threat of storm surge.  22,000 people killed!  To put this in perspective, about 1,300 people died in New Orleans after Katrina.  This is a monumental disaster, and much of the blaim can be layed on the hands of the military government there.  The goverment was, as Irishgit poined out, probably looking to reduce the population while increasing foreign aid remittances which it will look to pocket for itself.  I'd like to see if this causes true widespread opposition to the government--usually such instances do, and I suspect that the forces within the country pushing for democracy will gain some ground from this. 

The Myanmar government must be wetting itself with joy.  It rids itself of several thousand citizens it doesn't want anyway, appeals for and receives widespread foreign aid to deal with the disaster, and then doesn't distribute it.

Charming folks.

Bad enough to live in Burma (is this what Myanmar used to be called?) and worse yet to be crushed by mother nature. . .but has to lose a star due to Ameri-centric trends of our news media that, on occassion, treats foreign disasters like sad theater instead of events that actually cause ripple-effects across the globe.

22,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced is a massive tragedy. As the Myanmar military "government" has not historically shown a lot of compassion for its citizens, there's no reason to think they will start now. Poor, oppressed people getting crushed by nature and now dependent on a nasty regime to help them out.... brutal.