Al Jazeera, the Arab news organization that blankets the Muslim world, plans to offer a 24-hour television channel in English starting in late May. How well Americans will receive it remains a big question.

The televised news service burst into prominence in 2001, when it began showing Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the Islamic terrorist network and when it displayed Americans captured in Iraq, some of whom were later executed.

Many Americans came to regard Al Jazeera as nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for global terrorism. The Bush administration urged American news organizations to avoid reproducing Al Jazeera’s telecasts for fear they might include coded instructions for future terrorist attacks. The CIA is said to have considered planting agents in the organization’s headquarters in the Middle East emirate of Qatar.

While it promises “accurate, impartial and objective reporting” telecast from locations including Washington and London, it apparently has not yet arranged from U.S. cable or satellite service.

Still, Al Jazeera is a force to be reckoned with. For its projected service in English, it has already signed on the British interviewer David Frost, former Nightline correspondent Dave Marash and former CNN anchor Riz Khan. Its Web site, on a typical day, carried first-class report on a speech by Mr. Bush.

American media watchers so far seem skeptical. Kelly McBride, director of the ethics program of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., said by e-mail that she has yet to see the television edition, but “the Web site looks straightforward.” Earlier, she had been quoted by Gail Shister, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, as saying that Al Jazeera “clearly has a point of view, but so does Fox. There’s a market for that in the world, and in the United States it’s probably a growing market.”

Assuming that Al Jazeera’s service in English gets on the air as planned, it can be a useful eye into what’s going on in the Islamic world. One of its recent reports in Arabic shows that it is far more than just a propaganda mouthpiece. It carried a sensational interview in February with a Syrian-American psychiatrist. She criticized Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders for distorting the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries and leading Muslims into a self-defeating vortex of self-pity and violence.

The interview caused a furor among Muslims, triggering condemnation and death threats by some but praise by others for saying out loud what few Muslims dare say even in private.

Al Jazeera could thus be an influence that could lead moderate Muslims to assert themselves and take back the control that has been seized by the radicals in al-Qaida.