Leo Brent Bozell III, Donald Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to South Africa. (Kris Connor / Getty Images) 
President Donald Trump has nominated American conservative writer, activist and media critic Leo Brent Bozell III to be the next US ambassador to South Africa.
The White House forwarded Bozell’s name to the US Senate on Monday. This was forwarded to the Senate’s foreign affairs committee, presumably to schedule a nomination hearing, according to a Senate notice.
His nomination surprised some observers as Joel Pollak, the South African-born senior editor-at-large of the conservative journal Breitbart News and a zealous Trump supporter, and frequent critic of SA, had been widely tipped – though apparently mostly by himself – as the front-runner for the job.
In 1987, Bozell, 69, founded the Virginia-based Media Research Center (MRC), “an organisation whose stated purpose is to identify liberal media bias”, which he still heads, according to Wikipedia.
It adds that in 1998, Bozell founded an organisation called the Conservative Communications Center. The MRC also established CNSNews, the site of the Conservative News Service, later known as Cybercast News Service.
“On its website, MRC publishes Bozell’s syndicated columns, the CyberAlert daily newsletter documenting perceived media bias, and research reports on the news media.”
Wikipedia said he is the son of L Brent Bozell Jr, a noted conservative writer and activist, and the nephew of the late William F Buckley Jr, founder of National Review.
Conservatism runs deep in the Bozell clan. Buckley, who died in 2008, is considered one of the most important influences on conservative US thinking.
Bozell’s son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, from Palmyra, Pennsylvania, was convicted in September 2023 of 10 charges, including four felonies, for his participation in the storming by conservatives of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 to try to forcibly prevent the official ratification of Joe Biden as the winner of the November 2020 presidential elections.
On 17 May 2024, Bozell was sentenced to 45 months in prison, three months of supervised release and $4,729 in restitution on these charges, according to a statement by the Department of Justice.
He was released on 20 January this year after Trump’s blanket pardon of all those convicted for participation in the assault on the Capitol.
According to Wikipedia, in 2014, the Quad-City Times, based in Davenport, Iowa, announced it was dropping Leo Brent Bozell IV’s column because of allegations that his Media Research Center colleague Tim Graham had actually been writing the column. Talking Points Memo (TPM), a liberal political news and opinion website, found this ironic given Bozell’s criticism of the media for lazy journalism.
About-turn
Wikipedia also reported that Leo Brent Bozell III “was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, describing him as ‘the greatest charlatan of them all,’ a ‘huckster,’ and a ‘shameless self-promoter’. He said, ‘God help this country if this man were president.’ ”
“After Trump clinched the Republican nomination, however, Bozell attacked the media for their alleged ‘hatred’ of Trump,” Wikipedia said.
This sort of 180-degree about-turn on Trump was very common in Republican Party circles.
On Tuesday, President Ramaphosa told journalists that his government was mulling over the choice of a replacement for SA’s expelled ambassador to the US Ebrahim Rasool, who returned to SA on Sunday after criticising Trump in a webinar on 14th March.
“The United States is our second-largest trading partner, so therefore we need a top-class representative in the US so that is something we are still working on,” he told journalists after addressing the congress of the Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa in Ekurhuleni.
There has been considerable speculation on who Ramaphosa will choose to replace Rasool, with the names of former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon, former finance minister Trevor Manuel and current deputy justice minister Andries Nel being conjectured. DM