This chapter studies the coverage of the transatlantic slave trade in early modern Europe. Although many Europeans were aware that their merchants and companies transported enslaved African labourers to Caribbean and American plantations, the trade itself was not deemed a newsworthy topic in the seventeenth century. The role of newspapers as gatekeepers of the various media landscapes meant that the lack of reports on the slave trade helps to explain why it took so long before the traffic of enslaved Africans lead to moral outcry. The inhumane practice of selling and buying labourers in West Africa, the dreaded ‘middle passage’, and the hardship of plantation life in the Caribbean and the American South could be pieced together by newspaper readers only with great difficulty. Hence, before 1720, even embryonic forms of abolitionism were not part of the newspapers’ fabric. This chapter, then, charts the limitations of newspapers as carriers of news from afar, emphasising their predilection for events rather than processes, and their reluctance to follow undesirable stories.