Dumb Down Reporting on Illegal Artefact Hunting from Bonkers Britain's BBC

BBC fluffy bunny reporting
on artefact looting in UK

"Digging for treasure: Is 'nighthawking' stealing our past?" asks Lauren Potts ‏(BBC 21st March 2015) Of course not, she answers, she's found these wonderful big numbers on the PAS website. But she's not impressed enough to ask them what their definition of responsible detecting is ("Nighthawkers [sic] are not to be confused with responsible hobbyists, who follow the code set by the National Council for Metal Detecting...."). Was a time when the BBC used to... oh, never mind.

There is an official Code of Responsible Artefact Hunting agreed by a few more bodies than the   NCMD, but that is hardly relevant to what the headline suggests is the subject of the article. It poses a question, to which the answer can only be 'yes', and one would have hoped the article would go through the nature of the problem and the reasons for it existing and some ways we can deal with it other than just putting a few more policemen out there in muddy fields at night. Where is the interview with a nighthawk? A landowner? A member of the public who has confronted one?

What we get is akin to the BBC having a headline about Islamist militancy and then having an article which basically consists of a series of reasons why not all Moslems are terrorists, and some figures about Moslem charity organizations or something, just to bring that point home. All very nice, but confusing two very different things.