Al-Jazeera’s new English-language channel, set to debut in May, is already enraging some critics who fear it will become a mouthpiece for terrorists, but for the moment the fledgling network faces a bigger challenge: whether Americans will be able to see it at all.

With executives at the Qatar-based broadcaster pushing hard to get Al Jazeera International on the air, there is still no word of deals to secure cable or satellite distribution in America. The network, staffed largely by veteran Western journalists, was supposed to launch in March, but the target date was recently pushed back.

“They need some sort of entree into American homes,” a former CBS news executive, Alvin Snyder, said in an interview. “They have to attract not only distributors in the U.S. market, but sponsors,” Mr. Snyder, who also ran the American government’s international television broadcasts in the 1980s, said.

Arranging for carriage of the new network is the responsibility of AJI’s commercial director, Lindsey Oliver, a former executive with CNBC Europe. She was supposed to visit America last week to continue talks with potential outlets, but the visit was abruptly canceled.

“We are still negotiating distribution in the States,” a spokeswoman for Al-Jazeera, Rana Jazayerli, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. Ms. Oliver “is meeting with cable and satellite providers and sorting through offers and options.”

One challenge to winning distribution in America is whether AJI can overcome the reputation its Arabic-language sister network has here as a mouthpiece for terrorists and Islamic extremists. Several major cable and satellite providers contacted by The New York Sun said they had preliminary talks with AJI, but none said they were close to a deal.

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable, Mark Harrad, said his company doesn’t carry Al-Jazeera’s Arabic network nationally, but leaves some choices up to local cable franchises. “While there are a lot of foreign language channels, because of the political aspect of Al-Jazeera, I’m not sure anybody carries the Arabic channel,” he said.

The only major American outlet to carry Al-Jazeera’s flagship Arabic channel is the satellite-based Dish Network, owned by Echostar Communications. Al-Jazeera appears as part of a tier of Arabic-language channels purchased separately from basic service.

Earlier this year, Ms. Oliver told an industry publication, Broadcasting & Cable, the new English-language network had been offered carriage on an Arabic tier, but was holding out for wider distribution.

The new network seems to be making better progress in other parts of the world. A British satellite system part owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, BSkyB, already carries Al-Jazeera and plans to bring the new network into 8 million homes.

The nascent English-language channel has attempted to shed its baggage, in part, through a series of high-profile hires of distinguished journalists such as a longtime correspondent for ABC’s “Nightline,” David Marash, and a renowned BBC interviewer, David Frost.

Both men have stressed that the new network will be editorially independent of the existing one, though they have never said precisely why such an assurance is needed.

While the new channel’s promotional materials promise it will be “accurate, impartial, and objective,” Mr. Marash argued in an interview that one of CNN’s pitfalls was its attempt to present news from an entirely neutral perspective.

“They tried to create a kind of artificial all-the-world’s point of view, which was in many ways a classic American journalist’s point of view. ‘We’re nonpartisan. We are objective. We can do this from some perspective in space,'” he told the Sun.

The new channel plans to divide up the day into six-hour stints anchored from studios in London, Washington, Kuala Lumpur, and at Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. “Our mandate is to try and reflect the assumptions, the attitudes, and the interests of our regional base,” Mr. Marash said. “It’s a view I would classify as kaleidoscopic.”

Asked how the new network might have offered a different take on the recent dispute over a Dubai-based company’s plan to take over American port operations, Mr. Marash said, “I would guess in Washington we’d cover it with a special sensitivity. Much of the energy in the port security debate comes not so much from concern about security as concern about Arabic players.”

Mr. Marash said he viewed some criticism of the ports deal as reflecting bias similar to that facing his new TV undertaking. “We too are being Arabic-baited, if you will,” he said.

For years, the American government has debated whether to engage with Al-Jazeera or to freeze the network out. At the moment, those who favor engagement seem to have the upper hand. Last month, the State Department’s public diplomacy chief, Karen Hughes, spent several hours at Al-Jazeera’s hub, meeting with journalists and sitting for a videotaped interview.

“I talked with them about their coverage and in all cases I talk about coverage,” Ms. Hughes said at a subsequent roundtable with Arab journalists. She did not detail her concerns.