"...many rescue helicopters [ ] abandon[ed] their operations for one full afternoon due to dangerous conditions created by media airplanes."
Bull. Had a Temporary Flight Restriction been enacted to keep the media away, then Kim's wife and kids would be dead.
Here's the real story. A story of government incompetence of the highest order.
Excerpted rom the link:
There were high-tech means available that might have exploited the discovery that night, but no one called for their deployment.
The Oregon National Guard had a helicopter equipped with sensitive heat detectors that work best in the hours before dawn. It had spent Saturday searching roads in Curry County. Officials there said they were "going to pass the search to Josephine County."
The flight log says "there were no requests."
As the authorities waited and deliberated, a local helicopter pilot set out on his own. Like Powers, John Rachor grew ever more certain over the weekend where the Kim family was stranded.
At 10:30 a.m., he lifted off in his own four-seat helicopter, convinced he could find them. ...
Around noon, he said, he was flying low over the wrong turn the Kim family had taken. He spotted what appeared to be human footprints in the snow and car tire tracks, slightly obliterated by a recent snowfall....
Rachor was low on fuel and reluctantly decided to head for his home base at the Medford airport....
For the second straight night, the National Guard's heat-sensing helicopter sat on the tarmac in Salem, awaiting orders....
The next morning, Monday, Dec. 4, a snow cat began hacking its way down the logging road. It was about an hour away when Rachor returned to find the Kim family, farther down on the same road where he had spotted tire tracks the day before. Rubrecht [person in charge of government operations] said she didn't even know Rachor was in the air.
"I had no clue John Rachor [hero private pilot who saved family] was in the air until after Kati was found," she said. "No clue."
In fact, she said that "I really never felt like I had a handle on the air operation."
"I'm not afraid to tell anybody that it was overwhelming beyond anything I'd ever handled before," she said.
The government is looking for a scapegoat. I love to bash the media as much as the next guy, but television helicopters did not interfere with the search, except in the imaginations of government searchers looking for excuses.