Paul Sheehan, Annabel Crabb, Mark Scott, and pride riddled with arrant prejudice ...

(Above: Annabel Crabb on the right, with Caroline Overington, showing the correct ideological leaning required in these times and at the ABC?)

It was Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa who wrote “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi!” (If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change).

Well it makes for a damn shorter and more incisive insight than any on view in Paul Sheehan's The ABC of seduction: how Mr Darcy depends on damsels.

Sheehan's scribble is an attempt at fey whimsy, involving Annabel Crabb, Mark Scott, the new 24 hour ABC news channel, and it evokes most of all fond memories of dancing 'gators and hippos in Disney's Fantasia. Yep, hippos can dance, and perchance so can elephants.

Apart from suggesting that Sheehan has been beguiled by Annabel Crabb during her time in the "Fairfax family" and revealing the price of her shifting to the ABC - $250,000 a year - "all underwritten by the Australian taxpayer" - it's hard to know exactly the point Sheehan is making as he gets carried away with Crabb as Jane Austen, and Mark Scott as Mr. Darcy.

I can't in fact bring myself to quote the opening couple of pars - the talk of Crabb as rosy-cheeked, hard-working, fair-minded, witty, articulate, and a social satirist - is unfair both to Crabb and to Jane Austen (here's betting her rosy cheeks glow in the dark). And when Sheehan gets on to the clap happy Mark Scott as Mr Darcy - tall, smooth, well-funded, cosmopolitan and determined - he shows he understands little of Jane Austen, and perhaps should have been referencing Samuel Richardson's Pamela instead.

Sheehan seems to be shocked at the amount of profligate and shocking sitting down together in the courtship that saw Crabb, a consenting adult, head off to the ABC:

Now we know why he wanted her so badly. He needed her to opine, report, interview, quip, tweet, blog and otherwise flog the new 24-hour ABC news channel he announced last week. He already had an appealing woman of consequence to help launch this new network, Leigh Sales, but he knew that two cerebral bombshells is so much more than one.

In addition, his new recruit was witty, genuinely non-partisan and unpredictable, qualities in short supply at the ABC's earnest monoculture.

You mean the earnest monoculture that sees the likes of David Marr and Richard Glover flit between Fairfax and the ABC like peas very happy in the close kissing cultural pods?

Or is it the quality of the earnest monoculture that saw Ellen Fanning flit from the ABC and the radio programs AM and PM to head to the Nine network, the now demised Sunday program, the lost The Bulletin magazine and the still standing 60 Minutes?

Never mind, there's bigger fish to fry, and that's Sheehan's confession to a remarkable ignorance:

Last Monday this column noted that the Democratic Party was facing the prospect of an electoral disaster in a Senate byelection in Massachusetts, one of the most Democratic states in the nation. I would not have had a clue about this story had I relied on the usual suspects, CNN, the BBC, the ABC or The New York Times. Only by having Fox News Channel in the mix was I alerted to the story.

Wouldn't have a clue except for Fox? The news was out there on the full to overflowing intertubes, and Sheehan didn't have a clue until Fox came into his life? Has he just acquired cable?

Dear me, what planet does Sheehan live on? Don't answer Fox planet, because I fear it might be true. The possum has drunk long and deep of the Fox kool aid, and it seems it's now his only sound guide to American politics.

Well if he'd been reading the New York Times, he'd have seen that the tremors in that campaign began early in January, Democrats Anxious Over a Once-Safe Seat, and if he'd bothered, he'd have been able to read any number of critiques of Martha M. Coakley as a poor choice for candidate and an inept campaigner. Yes, the left in America can eat its own, just as they do in Australia. The last week of the campaign was full of 'for the love of the lord Massachusetts, don't do it" pleadings from assorted pundits, but they went ahead and did it anyway, and funnily enough, the world kept on turning.

And if Sheehan had noted that the ABC didn't do much about the story because all the lefties and socialists at the ABC were on holidays during January - in the Australian way, a month of vacuity, as rigorously observed by Fairfax as the rest of the media - and so the news was a dead zone. And international news, apart from earthquakes, a mystery worthy of the Pope.

But no, Sheehan is off on his own Fox worshipping path, traducing CNN, MSNBC, Air America Radio, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and naturally the ABC:

The moral of this story is that our ABC is closer to Air America (hello, Radio National) and MSNBC, but is sheltered from the vicissitudes of the marketplace and allowed its ideological self-indulgences through the subsidies of taxpayers.

Uh huh. About time for Sheehan to parrot the key message of Malcolm Colless in ABC's 24-hour news channel too much of a stretch?

The ABC's plan to launch in the next few months a 24-hour national television news service amounts to a taxpayer-funded declaration of war on commercial media outlets in Australia.

It also raises serious questions about the ability of the national broadcaster to support its image as the provider of high quality news and current affairs programming.

Yep, surely it's time for Sheehan to launch a vitriolic attack on the ABC and its expansion into 24 hours news coverage (though what will happen each January?)

Sorry, got that wrong:

Which brings us back to Scott and Crabb. What the ratings have shown is that news consumers don't just want news and opinion, they want energy, pace, idiosyncrasy, and don't mind a steady diet of good-looking women.

Ah, there you go Malcolm, all that concern about quality was a furphy. A little Fairfax will fix all that ails ya.

But wait, Annabel Crabb as an ABC equivalent to a blonde Fox bimbo? Sure thing.

So how about a celebration of the new channel? Sure thing:

Starting a 24-hour news channel was a no-brainer for the ABC. It was the only way the corporation can fully deploy its public resources. Thus it is the only way we, the taxpayers, can be fully recompensed for our investment. The convergence of the internet age with the digital era meant that the ABC, as the primary news organisation in the country, with the greatest resources, could operate a 24-hour news channel, and do so within its existing budget.

Bizarrely Sheehan even seems to be suggesting that the 24 hours news channel will soon be broadcasting into Asia, replacing the current 'soft' service provided by the ABC under the Australia Network label, its ownership of that brand currently contested by Sky Television, presumably on the basis that it too can provide a 24 hours news service, rather than the current 'soft' mix of lifestyle, drama, documentaries, childrens, current affairs, learning and education:

Scott, a politician as much as a manager, knows this. He also knows the Napoleonic Prime Minister wants an Asian news channel to compete with the BBC. That is why, in announcing the news channel, he said its start-up and operation would be funded from within the ABC's existing budget.

Hence the seduction of Crabb, who brings not just wit, warmth and big hair to the ABC, but an absence of pride and prejudice.

But she's a brunette!

Was it only a week ago that Sheehan was writing this about Fox in Fox adds a brunette to blonde weaponry against the President?

There are so many blonde women on the Fox News Channel that I ploughed through the channel's website to get the exact number. Thirty-five. It means that of the 53 women who appear regularly on air for Fox, an unnaturally large proportion - two-thirds - are blonde or near-blonde. Even the non-blondes on Fox News are unmistakably Fox News, because almost all come with the same chiselled chin-lines, big hair, radioactive lip gloss and glowing conservatism.

There you have it ABC and Annabel Crabb, a role model for you. Can I recommend How To Turn Your Hair Blonde Without Dye? And then you can spend 24/7 of your life presenting the news on the new channel, as a way of proving that one brunette can do the work of fifty three women on the only channel to provide Paul Sheehan with decent news about the United States.

Next thing you know Sheehan, instead of writing about the changes wrought in Fox by adding Palin to their slate, could be writing about the ABC news channel:

And Crabb is a brunette. Since I first checked the blonde quota on the 24/7 ABC news channel in 2011, it has declined modestly from 73 per cent to 66 per cent. Perhaps this is the ABC News Channel's idea of becoming more ''fair and balanced'', the phrase the network uses to define itself, without irony, despite the patent and increasing absurdity of the claim.

Oh sorry, you know what I mean. This is how it really read:

And Palin is a brunette. Since I first checked the blonde quota on Foxy News in 2008, it has declined modestly from 73 per cent to 66 per cent. Perhaps this is Fox News Channel's idea of becoming more ''fair and balanced'', the phrase the network uses to define itself, without irony, despite the patent and increasing absurdity of the claim.

Things get stranger and stranger in the bizarre monoculture that is Fairfax. Or is it just that Paul Sheehan inhabits an even more bizarre micro monoculture all his own?

Whatever, it's a relief that Crabb has escaped to the ABC, away from the Fairfax monoculture, because if it weren't for the age difference, you'd have to think Paul Sheehan fancies himself as a new age George Wickham ...

(Below: and now, and because it's Monday, and Australia and the ABC don't officially declare the summer season is over until Wednesday, and to show that hippos can dance, a short extract ...)