IMHO, the fault is Mr. Kim's. It was a tragic accident that did not have to occur.
My parents retired to Roseburg, OR, so I am quite familiar with the area in which Mr. Kim got lost. In conversations with my mother, she told me that it was snowing heavily that night. After dinner, the wise and prudent thing to do would have been to spend the night at a motel, and continue the trip the following morning.
I've read only snippets of the reporting, so I don't know how experienced Mr. Kim was at driving in snowy conditions. If my guess is correct, he was unfamiliar with driving under those conditions.
Kim was no.1 on the screw up list. But I don't want to bash the dead. He certainly did the best he could.
After that obviously the government ran around claiming they were doing this and that, while the real work was done by civilians.
The government did what it could, but it wasn't enough. The civilians who found the cell phone clues, and took it on themselves to search in their personal helicopters were motivated by the stories they saw in the media. Bashing the media is not only barking up the wrong tree, it's bashing on one of the key elements that saved the family.
When the media spews leftist propaganda, bash away, but in this case they did far more to help than hurt.
As a pilot, I'm not buying for one minute that there were "too many" civilian aircraft in the area for the military to fly. Some agency likely had a Washington policy that they would not fly without exclusive access to the area, but the idiotic policy is at fault, not the media. This wasn't some training exercise, people were dying out there, and the more lookers the better. This wasn't some small piece of airspace, it was a whole county or two, there was no need for exclusive military access.