No media ecosystem with a systemic liberal bias would’ve ever allowed an Ayn Rand acolyte offering warmed-over Jack Kempism to be treated as a serious person with important ideas. If rank-and-file members of the media actually evinced any understanding of ideology and political economy, Ryan simply couldn’t have gotten away with it. Imagine an avowed Marxist-Leninist ascending to the speakership as a Democrat, and a “Meet the Press” panel debating her New Economic Policy as, well, maybe a bit of a political lift, but something Republicans are really going to have to take seriously.
Ryan’s only truly canny move was that he didn’t personally engage in the culture wars (not that he rejected them—like all “mainstream” Republicans he knows that the popular culture warriors are necessary to get the unpopular supply-siders elected), making it easier for the press to treat him as a responsible alternative to Those Republicans. Ryan grasped, consciously or not, that the “liberalism” of the mainstream media is just a reflection of the geographical and professional milieu in which elite journalism is produced, and it features no actual political principles beyond cosmopolitanism. (Even that cosmopolitanism is undermined by the self-loathing instincts that lead nonpartisan journalists to constantly adopt the conservative framing of white, rural America as more “real” than urban, multi-racial America.)