With no American carriers on board as of yet, the Arab world's principal TV news source, the Al-Jazeera Channel, faces a hesitant American response to its global debut this May of an English-language spin-off targeting a European and American audience, writes The (Florida) Ledger. Satellite service EchoStar Communications Corp. (DISH), the only U.S. distributor of Al-Jazeera in Arabic, is the only company expressing any interest so far.

After talks over the past year with nearly all the big players, including Comcast, Time Warner, and DirecTV, Al-Jazeera International still has no distributors in the U.S. The controversial nature of the news channel gives distributors pause, but cable executives have also said that it makes little economic sense for them to pay a fee for yet another channel in the overly fragmented 400-channel TV universe, according to BusinessWeek.

The new network, Al-Jazeera International - which promotes "objective, accurate and impartial reporting" from a perspective predominately Arab - has signed talent including former Nightline correspondent Dave Marash, British interviewer David Frost, and former CNN anchor Riz Khan.

Though the network estimates its debut will reach over 40 million homes - 1 million being American - AJI's presence is still to be determined. "Some Americans will be curious, but I suspect most will be wary," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Washington's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Some will be infuriated."

Advertising, in addition to carriage, will be a tough sell for AJI in America. According to Brad Adgate, senior vice president of Horizon Media, a media-buying firm in New York, "There's a perception of Al-Jazeera that may not lend itself to mainstream advertisers. They may want to take a wait-and-see approach, to see if there is any slant to the news and the selection of what's being covered."