This week with our eyes, television sets, and phones turned towards Hurricane Irma, we got a break from the never-ending barrage of depressing political news that has been 2017. Of course, it's terrible what's been happening in Florida and the Caribbean Islands, and hopefully those places start to recover soon as the Hurricane retreats.

But it is interesting that it takes a natural disaster for our news alerts and twitter feeds to turn from Trump to something else. As a journalism and government student who lives, breathes, and sleeps the 24 hour news cycle, this week has been an interesting one for me. I have news alerts from AP, CNN, The Washington Post, Fox News, and more. I have news quizzes and assignments to watch broadcast news shows. This week when I settled down to watch CNN for an assignment, I expected to see segments on different areas of politics and a few human interest stories like I usually do. But this time, the whole newscast was just different reporters in seven different parts of Florida talking about what the storm was like from the city they were covering.

Not that there was a ton of action happening in politics this week anyway, but the news certainly took a break from it. This week, the news focused on informing the country on what was happening in Florida, on trying to help locate people and on trying to get people to evacuate. The country pulled together, put partisanship aside, and collectively did what they could to help Florida pull through this hurricane.

As bad as what happened in Florida was, it could have been a lot worse had it not been for the media. And all of those brave journalists who purposefully went into the eye of the storm to report what was happening, so other people didn't have to. There were many brave people involved in helping the citizens of Florida do their best to stay safe. The media is just a facet of this. This week was an exemplary situation of what news is supposed to be.