The Star Tribune was uncharacteristically effusive in its praise for the State Canvassing Board yesterday, editorializing that the complicated statewide recount has gone smoothly. “The judgments of the State Canvassing Board to date are also due a heaping measure of citizen confidence,” the editorial read. “The five-member board’s orderly, transparent and efficient dispatch of 6,655 challenged ballots has served this state well.”

But Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed declares a partisan failing in one canvassing board’s attempt at providing transparency.

He writes: “‘Non-partisan’ Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office has joined forces with the partisan liberal video-blog The UpTake to provide a live video feed of today’s State Canvassing Board meeting.”

Ritchie’s “SHAME,” as Brodkorb — characteristically in ALL-CAPS — puts it?

Writing via official SoS communique that “a live feed will be provided through ‘The Uptake.’” As City Pages notes, “The live feeds usually provided at the state Capitol are not in use this week and The Uptake has been providing an amazing service to people interested in the race by offering free and live video feeds of the state Canvassing Board meetings on their site.”

The UpTake offers the streams without added editorial comment. While their edited videos tend to be perspective-based, the Canvassing Board video feeds have been raw and live — more like C-Span than MDE. “This would be like Governor Pawlenty telling Minnesotans to go to [MDE] to find out information about his budget proposals,” Brodkorb insists. “While my blog is more credible, you get my point.”

A tempest in the teapot? Just an insider media squabble about who’s “legitimate media“? Maybe not.

Within a few hours of his first post, Brodkorb added another, by GOP chair Ron Carey, whose candidacy Brodkorb championed as Carey’s 2007 campaign manager (Brodkorb has also reportedly been hired as media director for the Senate Republican Caucus.)

Like Brodkorb, Carey apparently would also prefer a Canvassing Board blackout instead of commentary-free UpTake streams: “It’s amazing that a partisan, liberal blog” — a description nearly identical to Brodkorb’s — “has been made the official provider of the video for the Canvassing Board,” Carey said.

Then he gets to what might be the real strategy behind such a benign-seeming service as unmanipulated video feeds of public proceedings: Casting doubt on a recount process that shows Carey’s candidate headed for an increasingly likely defeat.

“To make a group with an agenda and a record of attacking one of the candidates before the Canvassing Board the purveyor of information is beyond improper, it calls into question the judgment of those who made the decision for this partisan website to be the sanctioned broadcaster of these important proceedings.”