This paper explores the existing empirical data on media coverage of human trafficking as part of a larger effort to establish a theoretical foundation for understanding the nature of national media coverage of cross-border issues. Because the EU contains source, transit and destination countries for trafficking, it provides an interesting “laboratory” for observing how national media behave – are source countries more likely to “blame” the richer countries while destination countries “blame” the poverty in source countries? What are the solutions? Who is responsible? These questions are important if international solutions are to be achieved, but in order to solve problems, policy-makers, activists and academics need a reliable database upon which to build. This paper finds that there is a severe lack of systematic comparative analysis of media content on the issue of trafficking and proposes a possible approach to build upon in the future.