While I thought Howard Kurtz's article about rifts in the Dean campaign was interesting and informative, it's important to remember what actually happened to the campaign.
Like Jill Lawrence's earlier USA Today, the tone of Kurtz's piece suggests that Trippi is the one more willing to talk to the press about rifts in the campaign, and as a result his perspective is largely reflected in the articles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15741-2004Feb28.html
In any event, these rifts had little to do with Dean's failure to win primaries as Trippi would agree.
Dean's lead in Iowa was always slim compared to his lead in the national polls (in which Kerry was polling below Sharpton). In the weeks immediately prior to Iowa, all the other candidates (even Sharpton because of competition from Dean in the DC primary contest, and particularly Gephardt) were focussed almost exclusively on bringing Dean down, and the national and Iowa media cooperated fully in these tactics. For example, ABC had its "troopergate story", NBC broadcast Dean's 1999 comments about the Iowa caucus (which the local Iowa affiliate turned into a 20 minute story on its nightly news), the NY Times front-paged a 1992 Vermont contract award, both Time and Newsweek unleashed extremely unflattering cover stories about Dean. All the other candidates were spared this negative focus in the few weeks before the caucus.
And obviously the media coverage of Dean's caucus night speech in Iowa made recovery in New Hampshire extraordinarily difficult (Dean was down to 9% in the Thursday single-day ARG New Hampshire poll after coverage of the speech). While he recovered admirably in NH, he was never able to undo the unfavorables that the speech coverage created in his national numbers.
Yes, there were flaws in Dean's campaign, but to attribute his failure to win primaries to these difficulties is throwing the truth of what happened down the memory hole. It is what the media wants to be the story so it can avoid its own responsibility for Dean's fate. After what we have been through with the media over the last several years, I can't believe there are people here (whether Dean supporters or not) who are willing to let them get away with this.