L Brent Bozell III is President Trump’s nominee for United States ambassador to South Africa, a choice rooted in long tenure at the intersection of media, politics, and fundraising.

He appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday for his nomination hearing.

Bozell was born in 1955 in Washington DC. He graduated from the University of Dallas in 1977 and soon became active as an activist and writer in conservative circles.

His uncle was William F Buckley, who founded the influential conservative magazine, the National Review. The magazine had been a strong supporter of Republican Barry Goldwater, who ran for President in 1964, losing to the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson. It also backed Ronald Reagan, who had reportedly been a fan of the magazine, and many of the policy positions that the magazine had lobbied for, were adopted by the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

Bozell’s father, Leo Brent Bozell Jnr was also highly influential in the American conservative movement. He worked as a speechwriter for Goldwater, and ghostwrote Goldwater’s 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative. The book was extremely significant in the American conservative movement and it has been credited with laying the foundation for the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s.

Bozell founded the Media Research Center in 1987 and scaled it into a suite of brands critiquing left-wing bias across news and entertainment. In May 2025 he moved to president emeritus as his son David Bozell took the helm, a family handover that signalled continuity and institutional depth.

His organising extended beyond the research shop. The Parents Television Council launched in 1995 with pressure campaigns on broadcasters and advertisers, while ForAmerica built an online mobilisation base tailored to viral conservative content. His résumé includes publishing and cable news commentary, anchored by the 2004 book Weapons of Mass Distortion, which set out a theory of media power.

He was on the periphery of some controversy in 2024 when another of his sons, L Brent Bozell IV, received a 45-month federal sentence for his involvement in the 2021 storming of the Capitol building in Washington DC, a matter not implicating the nominee.

Pretoria will be watching Bozell with some trepidation as he is likely to take a relatively hard line against the South African government and many of its policy positions.

Bozell is in many ways a member of American conservative royalty, and the significance of the decision by Donald Trump to nominate him as Washington’s representative in South Africa cannot be overstated.