From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. That the war in Afghanistan is getting attention at all these days

from members of the press is somewhat surprising. For a very long time, it seemed that

the major story about the war there was that nobody was covering the war there.

The war on terror began in

Afghanistan in the wake of 9-11, and while we tend to forget the war is still going on there,

we got a reminder today. The conflict in Iraq is the one we hear most about, and yet just 900

miles away in Afghanistan, some 25,000 American troops are fighting and dying. Some six years on, it's the war most Americans have forgotten about.

Mark Jerkowitz is Associate Director at the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Mark, welcome back.

Thank you, Bob. Good to be here.

Can you quantify just how neglected the neglected war has been?

In all of 2007, all of the coverage of Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan accounted for

about 1% of the newshole, which is all the coverage that we look at.

That's about 116th as much coverage as the war in Iraq got that year from the U.S. media.

In 2008, which at that point was the bloodiest year

for U.S. force in Afghanistan, the story stayed at the same basic level. The Beijing Olympics

got more overall coverage that year, at least in the media that we tracked, than the war in

Afghanistan. Even in the beginning of 2009, when it was clear with the new Obama administration,

that it was unlike Iraq, a war, that he was determined to prosecute on some level.

For the first half of the year 2009, it still only covered about 2% of the newshole.

So you could say for the first two and a half years that we looked at coverage of this war,

...