Earlier this year, it was taken as fact by seemingly the whole world that the Vatican had announced that the washing machine had liberated women (I wrote about it here). The Vatican, of course, had said no such thing. It was a bylined opinion piece in L’Osservatore Romano. I happened to think that the gist of it was based on sound publicly available Vatican thinking — Pope John Paul II’s new feminism, etc. — but it was very far from a declaration that women with clothes lines in their backyards need to have a crisis of faith about. But as with Dionne’s column, American newspaper readers, radio listeners, were lead to believe that there was official pontificating on washing machines.