Judging by the evidence put prominently on display yesterday, the Associated Press doesn’t understand the fundamental difference between debt and equity when it writes about investing.

Maybe it’s just one AP writer who is confused by that distinction. But there was surely an editor involved in the recent piece on the bank bailout program, in which debt and equity were confused. And no editor at the News & Observer, which made the AP story its banner, front-page story Tuesday, saw fit to correct it — although I know for fact that at least a few of them know the difference. Who’s on the job here?

Here’s how the AP story began:

WASHINGTON — Think you could borrow money from a bank without saying what you were going to do with it?

Apparently, when banks borrow from you, they don’t feel the same need to say how the money is spent.

To drive the point home, a companion piece to the story says this:

Under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, banks can apparently take taxpayer money and keep mum about how they plan to spend it.

Good luck trying that yourself.

If you’re a small business owner and you want a bank to lend you money, you’ll need to “provide information in a coherent, logical manner that answers questions even before they are asked,” says Chicago-based private-equity firm Gaebler Ventures.

So the TARP money was a loan, right? Uh, no. The Treasury Department (which is to say, the American taxpayer) is an investor in the banks that accepted TARP money. We gave the banks money and got an ownership stake in return. We’re an owner, not a lender. But when you invest in a company, that doesn’t necessarily give you the right to micro-manage how the money will be used. If you don’t believe it, go buy 100 shares of General Electric and see what happens when you tell the management how it can and cannot use the $1,643 you’ve invested in the company.

Strangely, the AP story at one point seemed to grasp the real nature of the TARP investments, when it explained that “the Treasury Department has been using the money to buy stakes in U.S. banks …” Otherwise, the whole article was built on the apparent belief that banks had borrowed money from the taxpayer, but refused to explain what they intended to do with it. In reality, the banks all said the same thing, more or less: Bank capital is managed as a whole, and we’re managing it appropriately.

Even more weirdly, the story doesn’t acknowledge that in some cases, banks essentially were coerced into taking TARP money. BB&T, for instance, didn’t need or particularly want the $3.1 billion it got from the federal government. But as CEO John Allison explained to the Charlotte Observer:

There was a lot of regulatory pressure on the large banks to take TARP [money]. They very strongly – very strongly – encouraged banks our size to participate.

Aside from those mistakes — the money wasn’t a loan, investors don’t get to micro-manage operations, and some banks didn’t even want the stinkin’ government money — the AP story was fine. Then again, after you fix those mistakes, there is no story.