It would be easy to conclude, based on its treatment of a story about Illinois lottery winners suing to force the state to disburse their payouts, that the Associated Press really doesn't want readers and its subscribing outlets to learn about it.

This "keep them in the dark" approach is consistent with a previous AP story on the state's failure to pay lottery winners. Let's start with that story's headline. Noted by yours truly on August 31 before the lawsuits were filed — "Lottery Winners Don't Get Largesse, But Get Left Out" — it was in my opinion deliberately vague and incoherent. The AP's headline at this evening's unbylined story, given the existence of the lawsuit, is even worse: "Amid budget debate, Illinois Lottery stops some payouts." Those who only get headlines in their newsfeeds on their phones, tablets and computers and don't click to read the story will have no idea that any legal action exists.

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump represents the essence of the Republican party. Very broadly speaking, conservatives say he doesn’t and liberals say he does. One liberal, Michael Tomasky, claims that Trump, despite his left-of-center positions on several fiscal and economic issues, nonetheless embodies the “two qualities more than any others [that] have driven conservatism in our time.”

The first quality, wrote Tomasky in the September 24 issue of The New York Review of Books, “is cultural and racial resentment…The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged…Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh.”

Here's a little parlor exercise readers can conduct with their friends who think that high-tech CEOs are the innovative saints of the universe.

The game would be to take the first three paragraphs of Michael Liedtke's Associated Press report on the collusion settlement to which that industry's major players just acquiesced, and revise it to reflect a different industry far less favored by the press. Then accurately point out the following: "There is no way this industry would gotten as much sympathy from the press as the AP gave these high-tech titans." After the jump, readers will see how I revised the AP's original first three paragraphs as if the settlement occurred in the oil industry, followed by what the AP's Liedtke actually wrote Thursday afternoon:

The press's failure to tell the public how seriously the U.S. economy is struggling is not the most egregious exercise in reality avoidance we've seen during the past several months. The willful denial of Iran's intent to destroy Israel and its Western enemies, the refusal to acknowledge the inherent institutional ugliness of Planned Parenthood, and the failure to accurately characterize Hillary Clinton's deliberate circumvention of established national security laws and protocols (all because "Her personal privacy was more important than the national interest") are clearly worse.

Nevertheless, the economy-related deceptions have not been unimportant. The press promotes the general impression that, well, conditions aren't ideal, but they're the best we can hope for — and besides, our mess isn't as bad as what we're seeing in rest of the world (and by the way, if the U.S. economy does tank, it will be the rest of the world's fault, and certainly not Dear Leader's). Let's compare Wednesday's exercise in furthering that impression at the Associated Press and compare it to what is really happening.

Silly me. I really thought that every state's lottery operation was walled off from the rest of its finances. They collect bets, pay out winnings and administrative costs, and turn over the profits to general fund. End of discussion. No muss, no fuss. Right?

In Illinois, based on recent developments, we know that's obviously not the case — leading me to wonder how many other states potentially have the same problem the Land of Lincoln currently has. You see, the state is about to move into the third month of a budget standoff between Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and its Democrat-controlled state legislature. As a result, because the lottery's operations are at least in a legal sense commingled with the rest of the state's finances, its comptroller has been forced to cancel payouts of lottery winnings greater than $25,000. It appears that very few media outlets outside of Illinois are interested in covering this obviously important story. Why?