Regular viewers of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on CNN, might be surprised at the venue that Dobbs chose for lunch not long ago: the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, a midtown bastion of the very same political and business “élites” that he denounces daily on his television program. The Four Seasons is the enduring commissary of the Old Guard, where Henry Kissinger waves to the former Citigroup C.E.O. Sandy Weill, there is limo-lock at the side door, and the regulars have their checks sent to the office. Dobbs’s Town Car left him at the door, on East Fifty-second Street, and the restaurant’s co-owner, Julian Nicolini, embraced him that day as warmly as when he welcomed, among others, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group; Nelson Peltz, the C.E.O. of Trian Partners; Edgar Bronfman, Sr., the former chairman and C.E.O. of Seagram; and Mortimer Zuckerman, the real-estate developer and publisher of the News. Nicolini led Dobbs to one of five choice banquettes, and Dobbs settled in, looking very much at home.

Dobbs is sixty-one, and his chubby face has a rosy glow. His blond hair is lacquered in place, his black wing tips are impeccably buffed. Other club members having lunch that day—the Nobel Prize winner James Watson, Bronfman, Peltz, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein—stopped at the table to say hello. It is the kind of welcome that one might have expected for an earlier incarnation of Lou Dobbs—the Harvard-educated anchor of CNN’s “Moneyline,” which in the nineteen-nineties served as a sort of video clubhouse for corporate America. But, in the past four years or so, Dobbs has been reborn as a populist—a full-throated champion of “the little guy,” an evangelical opponent of liberal immigration laws. His hour-long program, which airs at six, features Dobbs in a role that combines Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. On the air, he boomingly assails the upper management of corporate America for its “outrageous” greed, pay packages, and corruption, its opposition to increasing the minimum wage, its hiring of “illegal aliens,” its ties to “Communist China,” and its eagerness to send American jobs overseas.

The new Lou Dobbs often surprises those who recall the old Lou Dobbs of “Moneyline.” Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote, “Old admirers are aghast. It’s as if whatever made Linda Blair’s head spin around in ‘The Exorcist’ had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich,” a reference to the left-wing Ohio congressman and former Presidential aspirant. After an angry altercation on the show with James Glassman, a former New Republic publisher and current conservative supply-sider, Glassman said of Dobbs, “How did he transform from a business sycophant to a raving populist?” Glassman’s answer was that Dobbs had begun to “demagogue these issues.” (In questioning Glassman’s economic theories on his program, Dobbs accused him of talking “like a cult member.”) As if to answer such critics, Dobbs has recently published a book whose title is almost as long as the menu at the Grill Room: “War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and HOW TO FIGHT BACK.”

On the cover, Dobbs is standing—hands in pockets, feet apart—like a sentry protecting the boundaries of decency and the nation. At CNN, alone among the cable network’s anchors, he is allowed to express his opinions without borders. “I’m never neutral on any issue that affects the common good, our national interest, and working men and women of this country,” he writes. In many ways, Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled “Who’s Looking Out for You?,” are kindred spirits. Dobbs, who lives on a three-hundred-acre farm in a prosperous part of New Jersey, admires his own capacity for compassion and self-effacement. His audience, he writes, knows that he cares “more about them and their lives than about being invited to the White House or playing golf with C.E.O.s and celebrities.”

For most of its first half hour, “Lou Dobbs Tonight” contains more domestic and international news than does each of the three major network’s broadcasts, and Dobbs fills the role of the well-informed anchorman. Yet he also teases his audience, with headlines from stories that run in the second half hour, which is dominated by what Dobbs’s executive producer, Jim McGinnis, refers to as “brands”—segments with names like “Broken Borders,” “Homeland Insecurity,” “War on the Middle Class,” “Exporting America,” and “The Best Government Money Can Buy.”

“It’s very different from any program you’ll see on TV, by intention,” Dobbs said, as we ordered the fifty-six-dollar Dover sole. “What you won’t see on our broadcast is ‘fair and balanced journalism.’ You will not see ‘objective journalism.’ The truth is not ‘fair and balanced.’ There is a nonpartisan, independent reality that doesn’t give a damn, frankly, what two Democrats and two Republicans think about anything or say about anything.”

The cable-news universe is relatively small. About eight hundred thousand people watch “Lou Dobbs Tonight” (about nine million watch the “Nightly News,” on NBC), and in its time slot it lags behind Brit Hume’s show, on Fox, which has about a million and a half viewers. But Dobbs is narrowing the gap, and his news program is one of the handful on cable whose audiences are growing, rather than shrinking. The highest-rated cable news program is “The O’Reilly Factor,” on Fox, which averages about two million viewers, and Fox continues to lead CNN in the ratings, with MSNBC a distant third. A program’s ranking is affected by the length of time that viewers stay with it, and news shows that do best tend to have opinionated anchors, like Fox’s O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, whose audience has increased by two-thirds in the past year; and Dobbs, whose broadcast has drawn twenty-two per cent more viewers in the past twelve months. In October, the network announced that “Lou Dobbs Tonight” would expand from five nights to seven, and Dobbs was named one of CNN’s four Election Night anchors.

Dobbs has been with CNN since Ted Turner launched the cable network from Atlanta, in 1980, and both Dobbs and CNN have changed in the intervening years. Turner once liked to contrast CNN with the broadcast networks by saying that “news was the star” and that CNN expunged opinions from its news. Today, CNN heavily promotes its star anchors—particularly Dobbs, Larry King, whose show airs at nine, and Anderson Cooper, who comes on at ten. Cooper regularly travels to trouble spots and shares with viewers his personal responses to situations, and one longtime CNN employee said of his show, “It’s almost a fact-free zone. It’s a feeling zone.”

Unlike Fox, whose identity among its core viewers is often described as a celebration of conservatives, CNN seems to have adopted a “We’re on your side” stance as a way to boost ratings. It was encouraged by Dobbs, but also by Cooper, who expressed his outrage at the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and by Jack Cafferty, in cranky commentaries on Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room.” For nine nights in October, CNN ran a series called “Broken Government,” as well as two hour-long Dobbs town-hall meetings—the first on the “forgotten middle class,” the second on illegal immigration. CNN’s ratings improved dramatically, particularly among the most desirable demographic, twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds.

Jon Klein, the president of CNN in the United States, told me that when he arrived at the cable network, soon after the 2004 election, there was a perception that CNN would become more like Fox and that news, as he put it, “had to be glitzy and a diversion”—a series of tabloid narratives with constant updates. “No one wanted to cover Natalee Holloway, but they thought they had to,” Klein says, referring to the teen-ager who disappeared in Aruba. “That’s not said from some moral high ground. It’s business. If everyone else on television is doing it, don’t you want to do something else?” With its excitable coverage of these stories, Klein believed that CNN “was alienating its audience,” and damaging its credibility. From the digital world, where he once worked and where he could chart what people watched and when interest waned, he “learned that people get tired of stories easily.” Although CNN hardly ignores the more diverting stories, Klein wanted people at the network to “decide for ourselves what is important,” and CNN to distinguish itself through what he called “differentiation.”

Klein, who is forty-eight, spent nearly two decades in various capacities at CBS News, where he produced both serious work (overseeing “60 Minutes” and winning a Peabody Award for “48 Hours,” which is emphasized in his official biography) and less-serious news (the softening of “48 Hours,” which goes unmentioned). In 1999, after leaving CBS, he founded a broadband video company, the FeedRoom, which tells companies how to use video on the Internet.

With a worldwide staff of four thousand, CNN had more reporting resources than any of its competitors. When the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December of 2004, Klein says, he worked with his CNN international counterpart, and “We gang-tackled the story. We asked correspondents not to do standups but to find real human stories, to do storytelling.” He says that he quickly took note of Anderson Cooper’s talent for displaying empathy (Cooper replaced Aaron Brown in November 2005), and also decided that Dobbs’s program was fine as it was. “I committed ‘benign neglect’ on Lou,” Klein told me.

For some years, CNN has billed itself as “The most trusted name in news.” (A recent Pew poll, however, suggested that there is little difference in credibility among the cable news networks; the poll also noted that the number of Americans who said they believed “all or most” of what CNN reported has fallen from forty-two per cent to twenty-eight per cent since 1998.) Under Klein, CNN has, once again, placed greater emphasis on its chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, and given more airtime to John King, the chief national correspondent. After largely abandoning documentaries in recent years, the network plans to produce twenty-four hours in 2007; among the topics that the scheduled programs will cover are Iraq and the environment. After it became clear that CBS would choose Katie Couric to replace Dan Rather as anchor, Klein hired the CBS White House correspondent John Roberts, who had once been in contention for Rather’s job. He recruited Time’s Baghdad bureau chief, Michael Ware, as well as senior broadcast network-news producers: David Doss, formerly of ABC and NBC, to executive-produce Anderson Cooper; and Victor Neufeld, a veteran of CBS and ABC, to executive-produce Paula Zahn, who anchors the news at 8 P.M. He also replaced “Inside Politics” and the shouting match “Crossfire” with the more news-oriented “Situation Room.”

The showman in Klein competes with the newsman and, in the atmosphere of cable news, the showman often wins the contest. “There’s no question that Jon Klein wants more edge,” a senior CNN employee told me. “Klein is the most personality-driven manager we’ve had.” This employee respects Klein “as a leader” for returning the network to its news roots but worries that Klein is drawing the wrong conclusion from Dobbs’s improved ratings. “When we did the ‘Broken Government’ series,” the senior employee said, “in the first conference call he said, ‘I don’t want preconceived solutions, but, when you reach a conclusion, don’t be afraid to express it. I don’t want ‘He said, she said.’ ”

CNN’s news coverage coexists uneasily with its Dobbs-led populism. Among the viewers who are less than happy with the network’s current direction is Ted Turner, who told me, “CNN in the U.S. is quite a bit different than it was. They’ve gone more into emphasizing personality, and to some degree, particularly in the case of Lou Dobbs, they’ve encouraged him to promote himself and his own ideas to create a cult of personality to increase the ratings.” Turner paused for a moment before adding that Lou Dobbs is “a very talented newscaster, and he’s personally a friend of mine. Having said that, I personally think he’s gone too far inserting his opinions, for my taste.”

Dobbs often describes himself as “a kid who grew up poor” in rural Texas. He was the younger of two sons, born in September, 1945, in Childress (pop. 6,000), not far from Amarillo. His father was a partner in a small propane business, and his mother was a bookkeeper. When Lou was twelve, the propane business collapsed and the family, in search of a better livelihood, moved to a farm in Rupert, Idaho, where Lou attended public schools. His teachers encouraged him to apply to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1967, with a degree in economics.

His first job was working in federal anti-poverty programs in Boston and Washington, D.C. Dobbs recalls, “I decided to go out and make some money. I decided I wasn’t changing the world.” He then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a cash-management specialist for Union Bank, earning what was then an excellent salary of thirty thousand dollars a year to come up with ways for companies to manage their capital more efficiently. In 1969, he married a former high-school sweetheart; in 1970, the first of their two sons was born. But Dobbs grew restless at the bank, particularly after spending time with two friends who were journalists, and who, he says, “seemed to be having so much fun.” He had been saving money, and moved his family to Yuma, Arizona, where he’d heard about a job as a police and fire reporter for a radio station. His imposing physical presence and booming voice had been quickly noticed, and he soon began working with the affiliated television station. “I found what I really loved to do,” he says. His starting salary was seventy-five dollars a week. In the mid-seventies, he was hired as a television anchor-reporter, first in Phoenix and then in Seattle. At the end of 1979, a recruiter called to ask if he would be interested in the all-news cable network that Ted Turner was starting. Dobbs liked the idea of challenging the three broadcast networks, and Turner hired him to anchor a half-hour business newscast. On the Chicken Noodle Network, as CNN was sometimes called then, Dobbs was the youngest anchor. He is the only one from that period who is still with CNN.

Dobbs soon became a member of the network’s executive committee, and eventually supervised a staff of more than three hundred, overseeing all of CNN’s business coverage. He was also put in charge of business news on CNN.com, and became the president of CNNfn, a business cable network. His main job, however, was to anchor the half-hour “Moneyline” program, which in 1984 moved to New York. In 1998, it was given an additional half hour, and renamed the “Moneyline News Hour with Lou Dobbs,” allowing Dobbs to offer a wider range of reports.

Dobbs’s personal life had undergone a few changes during these years. In 1981, he divorced his wife. The following year, he married Debi Lee Segura, a sports anchor and a reporter for CNN; in 1988, Segura gave birth to twin girls. Dobbs bought his farm in Sussex, New Jersey, a ninety-minute commute to CNN’s studios in Manhattan, where he raised and rode horses, joined a country club, and collected guns. (His two sons, both businessmen, live in nearby Sparta; his daughters were recently accepted at Harvard.)