Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

When I heard that Renee Good was killed by ICE agents on January 7, my #rst reaction was, why? After hours of surfing the internet for answers, I still couldn’t figure it out. Was she an innocent bystander merely monitoring ICE activity in her neighborhood, a common practice of local residents in Minnesota? Or was she a domestic terrorist, who threatened the lives of ICE agent Jonathan Ross and his colleagues? Several news outlets I read reported the former while others the latter. Reading one convincing article after another, my mind rapidly oscillated between the two narratives. I thought I could eliminate editorial bias by watching videos of what happened; yet, even different videos portrayed disparate sequences of events that, once again, fell into the two categories I described above.

In a world where the media is supposed to deliver an accurate presentation of global events, partisanship is skewing major world news to the point where what “really happened” isn’t discernible anymore. My experience learning about what happened to Ms. Good and why isn’t unique. Like the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Jerome Powell or the capture of Maduro, I and myself often having trouble discerning what is really going on in the news.

I imagine that you often share this sentiment. We’re living amidst a journalism epidemic: traditional media is declining. More than half of the American population is getting their news from social media like Facebook, Instagram, X, and Youtube. Content creators, who are often looking to further some agenda of theirs instead of informing the masses.

This is where the Scroll comes in. As the official student-run campus newspaper, we’ve remained committed to the goals our predecessors laid out a century ago: bring high-quality, engaging, and pertinent information to the Deerfield community. And while we’ve evolved as media has changed—adding on a digital board to the publication that runs everything from our instagram account to our biweekly podcasts—our fundamental priority is still our print issues that you see lying around campus at the start of every month. Through our six pages: News, Op-ed, Features, Sports, Arts, and Buzz, we seek to inform you on everything from new teachers and guest speakers to the outstanding performances of our sports teams, arts showcases, and theater productions. And with these articles, you can be confident that the only agenda we have is to provide accurate information to you. This is my personal guarantee to you as the Editor-in-Chief of this paper.

With everything the Scroll does to elevate the current dilapidated state of journalism, we are still nothing without you, our readers. This is why I now give to you a call to action: interact with the Scroll in the numbered Days of Glory that we have at this magnificent place we call home. The next issue that you can expect from the Scroll, our February issue, will be my last after four years of working for this publication. This also means that our February 16–25 layout nights (the time period when the editorial board edits all the articles and lays out the actual paper) will be the last ten days I’ll remain a Scroll member.

I want to share these days with you. Whether you’ve written for the Scroll in the past or barely even read a Scroll issue, I encourage you to show up to the Scroll room in the basement of the Kendall building anytime from 6:45 PM–9:45 PM on the days that I mentioned above. Observe your peers editing articles or working in Adobe InDesign. Come see how the Scroll is really made: of the students, from the students, for the students. Only together can we lift journalism out of its current state, one publication at a time.

Yours in Service,

John Qi Liu