A story about a deadly terrorist attack briefly inspired a frenzied media scrum Friday morning in Southern California when dozens of reporters and TV news crews entered the home of the two shooters in the San Bernardino massacre.

NPR’s Nate Rott spoke to the landlord at the shooters’ apartment in nearby Redlands after the scrum began. The landlord says he allowed journalists into the home of Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik after it was returned to his control by federal law enforcement officials. Reporters quickly held up photographs to the camera, picked up documents and generally tramped throughout a site that had still been considered part of an active federal investigation just hours earlier.

While all three major cable networks showed footage, MSNBC was particularly aggressive, claiming it had broadcast an exclusive with its footage, shown only a few minutes before its competitors. Indeed, MSNBC’s Kerry Sanders complained that rival news teams were “a-pushing and a-shoving.”

MSNBC’s Kerry Sanders does a live broadcast from inside the home. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

He subsequently held up photographs from the apartment, presumably of family and friends, and even showed a California driver’s license of the mother of the male shooter. Her identifying characteristics, including her date of birth, address, eye color and the like, were clearly visible on screen.

MSNBC issued a statement Friday afternoon apologizing in part for its broadcast: “Although MSNBC was not the first crew to enter the home, we did have the first live shots from inside. We regret that we briefly showed images of photographs and identification cards that should not have been aired without review.”

It was a notable acknowledgement of the absence of editorial discretion. CNN took a victory lap by issuing its own statement citing a “conscious editorial decision not to show close-up footage of any material that could be considered sensitive or identifiable.” Fox similarly broadcast images from the shooters’ home but did not show images of the IDs.

Regardless, the scene was chaotic on all the networks, as though they were broadcasting live streams of reporters picking up scattered tiles of a mosaic and examining them one by one, without any hope of context or meaning.

A reporter takes a photo of a dining room table inside the home in Redlands. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

People on social media complained in real time, accusing journalists of voyeurism or worse. CNN’s Anderson Cooper looked visibly uncomfortable, and Wolf Blitzer later said, “I’ve certainly never seen anything like this.” One of CNN’s law enforcement analysts watching the video live said, “I am so shocked I cannot believe it,” though he appeared to be referring as much to the decision by law enforcement officials to walk away from the killers’ home as to the reporters’ activities.

At a later press conference, David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI office in Los Angeles, said his team had extracted all relevant evidence and no longer had any interest in the apartment.

The landlord told a local CBS station that the media had “rushed in” — that he had not let all those reporters in. MSNBC’s Sanders told viewers that the TV tabloid show Inside Edition had paid $1,000 to get in and that everyone streamed in with its crew. (A spokesperson for Inside Edition declined an NPR request for comment.)

Property landlord Doyle Miller speaks to members of the media outside Farook and Malik’s home. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

After about 20 minutes, the circus had devolved to outright farce. A CNN producer told Blitzer that the throng in the apartment was no longer composed simply of journalists, but of curious onlookers: “There’s a woman with a dog walking into the house.”

NPR producer Becky Sullivan contributed reporting to this story.

A federal jury has convicted former Massy Energy CEO Don Blankenship for conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards at the Upper Big Branch mine, site of a 2010 explosion that killed 29 people. The misdemeanor charge carries a sentence of up to one year in prison. He was acquitted of two more serious charges involving securities fraud and making false statements.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

In West Virginia, a federal jury has convicted former Massy Energy CEO Don Blankenship of conspiring to willfully violate federal mine safety laws. The case concerned the Upper Big Branch mine. In 2010, an explosion there killed 29 miners. Convictions like this are rare among top coal executives. From West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Ashton Marra has more.

ASHTON MARRA, BYLINE: Dozens of West Virginians gathered outside the Charleston courthouse awaiting the verdict – guilty on one misdemeanor charge, not guilty on two felony counts.

SHIRLEY WHITT: They did say guilty, so he’s not walking away from this.

MARRA: Shirley Whitt lost her brother in the mine explosion that sparked the investigation into Massey Energy and its CEO. The two felony charges were for allegedly lying to investors and securities officials. But U.S. attorney Booth Goodwin maintains the misdemeanor conviction is still a victory.

BOOTH GOODWIN: I’m not, in any way, disappointed with this result. I think it brings justice and justice that was long overdue.

MARRA: The prosecution had tied the felony charges to company generated documents about safety which the defense argued could not be traced to Blankenship himself. Bill Taylor is Blankenship’s lead attorney.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BILL TAYLOR: There’s never been a charge of securities fraud based upon the kind of subjective language like that. You know, there was a quality of make-it-up-as-you-go-along in this case.

MARRA: No further charges are expected in the Massey investigation. Blankenship’s attorneys, however, say they will appeal the misdemeanor conviction. Sentencing is scheduled for March. For NPR News, I’m Ashton Marra in Charleston, W. Va.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Dale Russakoff, author of the book, The Prize, about what lessons Zuckerberg learned from his $100 million donation to fix Newark, N.J., schools.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

When Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced the birth of their daughter, they also announced that they plan to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity. In an open letter to their newborn daughter, Maxima, they wrote about what they hope to accomplish and how they’re going to do it. For people who follow the Facebook founder closely, the details reveal a lot about what he’s learned since he donated a hundred million dollars to fix Newark, N.J.’s public schools back in 2010. That effort was widely seen as falling far short of its goals. Dale Russakoff wrote about it in a book called “The Prize.”

DALE RUSSAKOFF: What I found interesting from the very beginning was, you know, he was disarmingly open about how little he knew about philanthropy. He was 26 years old and he said that the goal of this gift was, you know, first of all, to try to help Newark and Newark students, but he wanted to use it as a chance to learn to become a better philanthropist.

SIEGEL: Well, when you saw the open letter yesterday, what struck you as evidence of lessons that he took away from the Newark experience?

RUSSAKOFF: Well, the first two principles were – seem to be drawn very directly from lessons learned from the problems they had in Newark. The first one, they think that philanthropy has to be for the long-term. I mean, 25, 50, 100 years – and the Newark gift was supposed to be a five-year gift in which they were going to not only turn around the Newark schools but come up with a model that could be used in every district in the country to turn around all the failing schools in urban America. I don’t know that they ever expected to accomplish that in the first place, but five years is not enough time to do that even in one city. And then the second principle was that they wanted to make sure that, you know, in doing philanthropy, that they were engaged from the beginning with the people who they were trying to serve – the community – and that they had to know their needs and their desires in order to serve them and in order to help empower them. And I think one of the real problems in Newark was that there was no – almost no community involvement and that the entire agenda was planned without the input of anyone who had ever taught in the Newark schools or had a child in the Newark schools, and there was tremendous, explosive resistance in Newark that at various points, imperiled the whole effort.

SIEGEL: I wonder if they’ve derived a lesson from the scale of the gift compared to the institution they were giving to. That is, a hundred million dollars is a huge amount of money, but the Newark public schools spend about a billion dollars a year.

RUSSAKOFF: That’s right. In over five years, a hundred million dollars is only 2 percent of what the district schools were already spending. So, you know, they were talking about trying to change the systems in the school – the management systems. And I think they had hoped that by changing systems and changing incentives and having better data and better evaluation systems and better pay systems, to reward teacher excellence – that all of those things would translate into better student performance. And I think they realized that you have to do a lot more in the community and the neighborhoods and in the lives of the kids as well as in the system of the schools.

SIEGEL: Why a new philanthropic organization? Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are 31 and 30. They’re not very experienced in charitable works even with the experience of Newark. They could have given the money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation instead. What’s the point of creating a new philanthropic institution do you think?

RUSSAKOFF: Well, I think that they want to do things differently. You know, they’re – what they’re looking at in education is very different from what Bill Gates is looking at. And they want to do not just charitable investments but, you know, perhaps some profit-making investments to develop technologies that they think can make a different. So it’s not a foundation, it’s a – kind of a hybrid organization, it’s an LLC.

SIEGEL: Dale Russakoff, thanks for talking with us about it.

RUSSAKOFF: Oh, thanks for having me.

SIEGEL: Dale Russakoff is author of the book “The Prize.” It’s about Newark, N.J.’s attempt to fix its schools with a hundred million dollar donation from Mark Zuckerberg.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.