In 2023, the British Guardian published one of the first and most detailed investigations undertaken by a media company into their own complicity in the slave trade. According to the paper, "the research began by investigating historical links between John Edward Taylor, the journalist who founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821, and transatlantic slavery -- as well as researching the investments and business activities of the 11 other men who loaned money to start the newspaper." Taylor, the investigation concluded, "had links to slavery through partnerships in cotton manufacturing and merchant firms that imported raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas." Digging deeper, the researchers discovered that nine of the eleven men who loaned money to Taylor to found the Guardian had similar links.
There is no reason to think that the Guardian is unique or unusual, except that it bothered to undertake the exercise of digging into its own history. In seeking to digitize and datafy every advertisement for a slave sale ever printed in an American newspaper, the To Be Sold project also seeks to highlight the pivotal role newspapers played, and the pivotal profits they made, shilling for the trade. Which papers printed the most ads? Which papers are still extant? What percentage of their annual revenue relied on the sale of ads? How should newspapers go about acknowledging their own complicity in the trade? These are all important questions that the project seeks to answer.
